This grant provides funding for the establishment of an engineering virtual organization (EVO) to further the science of discrete-event logistics systems (DELSs), using cyberinfrastructure (CI) as an enabling technology. The community of DELS researchers has been and largely continues to be organized around the paradigm of sub-optimizing subsets of activities or subsets of issues. We seek to establish the DELS EVO and supporting CI that will create an alternative system-oriented paradigm for DELS research by making it possible for teams of researchers to address broader system issues from a unified and comprehensive perspective. The foundational technologies for the EVO will be high-fidelity digital mockups of large-scale complex DELS, combined with high-bandwidth distributed computing. The essential enabling technology is a new systems modeling language SysML that provides the descriptive power needed for comprehensive, unified representations of DELS.
The active engagement of the DELS community both academics and practitioners will be facilitated by this effort through a series of meetings at professional conferences and company locations that culminate at a meeting to describe a DELS CI prototype, defining the user requirements for the EVO, the critical operational principles, and the highest-priority research initiatives. This prototype will be realized by launching an initial EVO web presence, and by demonstrating, in a limited way, the potential for creating high-fidelity representations of DELS, and using distributed computing to support DELS design. If successful, the results from this effort will enable individuals and groups to engage high-fidelity digital mockups of DELS through standard web-based technologies. This capability will fundamentally change the way the DELS domain is taught and learned, by making learning about DELS richer and much more immediate to students. In addition, the creation of even a crude DELS theory will have very important significance for developers of large scale software systems used to plan, operate, and control DELS.
