Journal of Simulation (JOS) publishes articles, technical notes, case studies and tutorials in the field of simulation, with a particular focus on the applications of simulation and modelling. Journal of Simulation is an official journal of the OR Society.

This article presents a novel simulation tool for the analysis of winter navigation operations in the Baltic Sea in the context of the Finnish–Swedish Winter Navigation System (FSWNS). The aim of the tool is to simulate the performance of the FSWNS under various potential future operating scenarios and thereby support decision making in matters affecting the operation and development of the FSWNS, for instance, in terms of icebreaking resources and ice class regulations. To this end, the tool considers key performance factors and characteristics of the FSWNS, such as the prevailing ice conditions, the ice-going capability and other technical characteristics of the relevant merchant vessels, the availability of icebreaking resources, and the features of specific icebreaking operations (e.g., convoys). The tool would allow testing of several “what-if” scenarios, answering questions related to optimal engine power for safe, efficient, and environmentally friendly navigation and the optimal scheduling of icebreakers for effective and cost-efficient assistance missions.

Communication skills are key to the workforce success of engineering graduates. The Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering (ISyE) Workforce Communication Program at Georgia Tech has successfully incorporated executive panel interaction into its capstone design course to align student skills with executive expectations. The objectives of the panel are to raise student awareness about the importance of communication to workforce success and to gain knowledge about communication skills directly from executives. Executives interact directly with students about workforce communication, career advancement, and the communication skills they consider most critical. The process of assembling and holding a panel is described for potential implementation in other engineering programs.

In this paper, we present an iterative scheme integrating simulation with an optimization model, for solving complex problems, viz., job shop scheduling. The classical job shop scheduling problem which is NP-Hard, has often been modelled as Mixed-Integer Programming (MIP) model and solved using exact algorithms (for example, branch-and-bound and branch-and-cut) or using meta-heuristics (for example, Genetic Algorithm, Particle Swarm Optimization and Simulated Annealing). In the proposed Iterative Simulation-Optimization (ISO) approach, we use a modified formulation of the scheduling problem where the operational aspects of the job shop are captured only in the simulation model. Two new decision variables, controller delays and queue priorities are used to introduce feedback constraints, that help exchange information between the two models. The proposed method is tested using benchmark instances from the OR library. The results indicate that the method gives near optimal schedules in a reasonable computational time.