Simulation plays a major role in the digitalization project Productive4.0. Each year, the issue is on the agenda of the Winter Simulation Conference which was held at Gothic Towers Hotel in Swedish Gothenburg last December. The event is regarded as the leading international forum for disseminating recent advances in the field of simulation.

During three days from Sunday, December 9 on, the conference embraced several keynote talks and hundreds of simulation paper presentations as well as vendor tutorials and booths across all domains. Interesting bridges between domains such as health care, military and defense, project management aviation and production could be built in this cross-domain event.

Wide scope of themes

The presentations in the framework of Productive4.0 were strongly forming and shaping the production simulation domain. The wide scope ranged from strategic supply chain simulation-based decision support system across novel approaches of data management, visualization and digitalization to real time simulation-based queueing and scheduling systems. It was broadly filled with numerous papers from different partners of the Productive4.0 consortium which took the chance to host an evening reception.

The specific conference track “Modelling and Analysis of Semiconductor Manufacturing Systems” (MASM) was hosting numerous papers concentrating on semiconductor manufacturing simulation use cases. During several invited Productive4.0 talks in this track a variety of modelling and implementation results of the project were presented.

Frameworks drawing attention

After the keynote speech and the reception which was hosted by Productive4.0, the digital reference developed within the project was referred to in several round tables. One of the central themes was on frameworks which evolved from the MIMAC model during JESSI/Sematech cooperation in the 90s to todays digital reference of Productive4.0.

With the successful event in Sweden already being history, the 2019 Winter Simulation Conference will be held in the US. It will take place from December 8-11 at National Harbor, Maryland, an exciting location at the Patomac River just a few miles south of Washington D.C. As with other conferences, Productive4.0 members will of course use the platform to disseminate their results.