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Members of the modeling and simulation community gathered in Washington on Feb. 6 for the Inaugural Congress of the National Modeling and Simulation Coalition (NMSC).
The NMSC is a new voluntary, nonprofit organization formed to bring together stakeholders who use modeling and simulation in a variety of industries, including defense, manufacturing, medicine, energy, transportation and education.
The coalition’s mission is to create a community to advocate for modeling and simulation, as well as develop best practices for using M&S technology “to better the human condition and to strengthen the national well-being.”
Sridhar Kota, assistant director for advanced manufacturing with the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), recommended lowering barriers to modeling and simulation technology in order to accelerate the pace of innovation. In particular, he encouraged democratizing the use of modeling and simulation tools for small and medium-sized manufacturers.
Aneesh Chopra, U.S. Chief Technology Officer, who serves as an assistant to President Obama and associate director for technology with OSTP, also supported these recommendations in his keynote address.
Chopra urged companies working with the Defense Department to harness the power of cloud computing for small and medium-sized businesses to access modeling and simulation. He emphasized that the private sector is very interested in modeling and simulation, and that contractors should serve the market.
“Selling to small and medium-sized businesses is not a charity,” he said. “It’s a profitable business.”
Indeed the private sector has taken a strong interest in modeling and simulation, as was evident by the diverse range of speakers at the inaugural congress.
Smart Manufacturing
Jim Davis, Chief Technology Officer at the University of California, Los Angeles, believes modeling and simulation can be applied to “smart manufacturing” — a process of collecting, analyzing and modeling data to create real-time applications for generating new products and responding to demand.
However, the right infrastructure to carry this forward isn’t yet in place, according to Davis, who is also co-leader of the Smart Manufacturing Leadership Coalition. He suggested a collaboration hub is needed to provide real-time data and modeling workflow, a test bed for manufacturers and suppliers, and access for small and medium-sized businesses.
Medical Simulation
Dr. David Gaba, associate dean for immersive and simulation-based learning at Stanford University School of Medicine, provided the coalition with an update on medical simulation. To demonstrate the rapid boom of medical modeling and simulation, Gaba sited the Society for Simulation in Healthcare, which has grown from around 180 members in 2004 to more than 3,500 in 2012.
Gaba said although a new industry has spawned from this technology, there are few examples of definitive evidence that healthcare-based simulation saves lives.
“Healthcare simulation is new enough that we have yet to map out an ideal approach to achieve this data,” he said. “I believe we need a more profound next step.”
Gaming
Robert Gehorsam, CEO of Image Metrics, based in Santa Monica, Calif., played a video of Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3 to demonstrate the immersive, collaborative nature of video games, and their ability to create a strong sense of community among players.
“Imagine what we could do in professional communities if you could provide technology to enable that kind of experiential collaboration,” Gerhorsam said.
He emphasized the power games have for people to have fun together and also teach each other.
Selling Contradictions
Thomas Lange, who leads the modeling and simulation department at Procter & Gamble, joked that many people often wonder why “rocket science” is need to build such ordinary products. But, he said, his company “is in the business of engineering contradictions.”
For example, Lange pointed out the difficult tasks of producing toilet paper that is soft yet strong, or diapers that breathe yet contain. He also acknowledged the importance of scale. Procter & Gamble can produce about 2 billion diapers in about two days.
“To do so takes a machine with more moving parts than most commercial aircraft,” Lange said.
It is for these reasons that the company relies on modeling and simulation to help ensure that its products, as well as the machines the products are produced upon, will work as predicted.
Looking toward the future, Lange said he hopes to tackle bigger problems with more complexity. He also stressed the importance of educating the next generation of modeling and simulation professionals.
“Undergraduate engineers for the most part aren’t computationally aware when they come to me,” he said. “We need to introduce more of that into our educational environment.”
