Case studies

The Corps of Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers (REME) maintains all electrical equipment within the British Army. Among other duties, engineers maintain the Apache Attack Helicopter, one of the world’s most advanced multi-role combat helicopters. This aircraft is very maintenance demanding: it takes about 35 hours of maintenance to cover one hour of flying. That was one of the reasons REME management considered their unit understaffed and claimed that it had to expand the mechanics department.

Pfizer, one of the world's largest pharmaceutical companies, asked Fair Dynamics, in collaboration with Health Services Consulting Corporation, to develop a platform that would help the company’s researchers test a new drug for patients with painful diabetic peripheral neuropathy. The platform would be based on previous clinical studies and act as a decision support tool, which could assess a patient’s personal parameters, prescribe drug dosage, and predict possible outcomes.

This model simulates the maternity ward in a hospital currently under construction. The purpose of the model is to support discussions related to which resources, capacity, and work methods are required on the new ward. The project was carried out for Karolinska University Hospital in the Stockholm County, Sweden.

Symbotic is a warehouse automation solutions provider. Its systems are based on mobile robots that can travel freely throughout a dense storage structure, accessing products in all locations and handling them at a very high throughput rate. The company needed a tool to help their customers learn the impact of warehouse reorganization and compare capital investments against expected operational savings before the actual introduction of automation systems.

Fruit of the Loom (FOTL) is one of the largest US apparel manufacturers and marketers. The company was expanding, and the executives wanted to know if it would be beneficial, in terms of shipping costs, to add a new distribution center (DC) in the US, or to redistribute products to a pre-existing DC. The contractors decided to simulate the whole supply chain in order to visualize DC locations on a GIS map, and the supply network between them. Focusing on wholesales, the company considered distributors as customers. No small packages or end-users were involved in this case.

One of the largest oil and gas pipeline operators in North America was delivering oil to a client that was not always able to accept the incoming batches. The operator was challenged to quantify the system impacts of deferred downstream deliveries. They also needed to determine whether the existing tankage at upstream oil terminals would be adequate to store the deferred batches.

Element AI turns cutting-edge AI research and industry expertise into software solutions that exponentially learn and improve. The company was looking into potential ways to combine simulation with AI and identified three challenges to address with the assistance of AnyLogic.

HAVI is a $5 billion global company and McDonald’s long-time supply chain and packaging partner. They provide services for supply chain management, packaging, logistics, and recycling and waste. When McDonald's wanted to build on the success of All-Day Breakfast and introduce additional menu items at 14,000 restaurants, they chose HAVI to complete the project.

The world’s largest companies use data analytics to increase their revenue and keep up with the changing business world. But how does data science relate to simulation modeling, and what are the cases for the implementation of this interaction, primarily concerning value for the business? The United Services Automobile Association (USAA), a Fortune 500 group of companies, has answered these questions with real-life solutions.

The BNSF Railway Company is one of the largest freight railroad networks in the United States. The company has 32,500 miles of track in 28 states and three Canadian provinces, and more than 8,000 locomotives. Expanding the company’s existing facilities, and developing new facilities in intermodal segments, would require making large capital investments. To help evaluate various options of capacity expansion in major facilities, and make data-informed decisions, BNSF developed container terminal simulation models of the Corwith and Hobart facilities.