Young-Jun Son, professor and head of the Systems and Industrial Engineering Department at University of Arizona, will give the Computer Science Distinguished Lecture on Wednesday, November 8 from 12:45–1:45 p.m. in Stuart Building, Room 111. His talk is entitled “Distributed Federation of Multi-paradigm Simulation and Decision Models for Planning and Control.” All are welcome.

Son will discuss three major simulation modeling paradigms: 1) discrete event (DE), 2) agent-based (AB), and 3) system dynamics (SD). He will use a product diffusion model to prove that AB and SD models essentially represent the same system state via probability theory and solving differential equations.

Son will then discuss innovative uses of multi-paradigm simulations to support planning and control decisions. First, he will discuss a simulation-based planning and control (SPC) approach, where a fast-running DE simulation is used to evaluate decision alternatives at the planning stage, and the same simulation model (running in real-time) is used as a task generator to drive a real system (e.g., shop floor system; border patrol system) at the control stage. He will then discuss extension of the SPC approach to enterprise level activities (e.g., top floor). To handle computational complexity, he will explain both an aggregation approach involving SD models as well as a federation of multiple DE models using web services technologies. Finally, he will describe a highly detailed AB model, where human behaviors (e.g., evacuation from factory fire; border trafficking behavior) are represented by an extended Belief-Desire-Intention (E-BDI) framework.

Son is department editor of IISE Transactions and serves on the editorial board for six other international journals. He is an Institute of Industrial and Systems Engineers Fellow and has received a number of research awards, including the Society of Manufacturing Engineers 2004 Outstanding Young Manufacturing Engineer Award, the Institute of Industrial Engineers 2005 Outstanding Young Industrial Engineer Award, the Industrial Engineering Research Conference Best Paper Award (in 2005, 2008, 2009, and 2016), and the Best Paper of the Year Award (2007) in International Journal of Industrial Engineering.  His research works have been sponsored by National Science Foundation, Air Force Office of Scientific Research, U.S. Department of Transportation, U.S. Department of Agriculture, U.S. Department of Energy, and National Institute of Standards and Technology, among others.