We look forward to working with middle and high school students again... Interested students, please visit: |
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-------------------------------------------------------------------- Understanding the Supply Chain and How Delays Affect Supply Chain Management 29 June 2009 - 6 August 2009
At the poster presentation of the young scholars. Left to right: Vanessa Zamy (Junior at Boston Latin Academy), Dora Pepo (Senior at Quincy High School), Prof. Sipahi. Summary Any product in the market can effectively reach to consumers only if the supply chain designed to deliver this product works efficiently. For instance, a computer manufacturer sells products to U.S. market, it receives chips and electronic parts from overseas. Such a supply chain construction is inevitable due to economical reasons (overseas may provide cheaper parts), however, shipment delays become significant and transportation disruptions can put the American company into difficulty in responding to its customers effectively. In the contrary, due to delays, unnecessarily large number of products may accumulate as well, especially by the time products arrive to the stores the consumer demand might be low. This causes stocking problems and the company will loose money to get rid of these extra products by offering sales. It is therefore very imporatnt to investigate how shipment and transportation delays may affect the number of products in the inventories. If we can understand how these effects play role in the inventory levels, then we can also find ways to propose better supply chain management strategies, which can ultimately save companies millions of dollars. |
-------------------------------------------------------------------- Experimenting Delay Effects on a Ball-Beam Dynamics & Comparison with Theory 30 June 2008 - 6 August 2008
In the laboratory. From Left to right: Benjamin Gertner (Framingham High School), Mike Wilson (Beverly High School), Prof. Sipahi.
Summary Delay presence in communication, actuation and sensing once coupled with decision-making may lead to disfunctionality (instability) of dynamical systems. Theory however also proves counter-inutitive arguments, which state that delay may also be a parameter helping dynamical systems to recover their functionality (stability). Dynamical systems with delays are all around us. They encompass networked control systems, coordination of mobile robots, tele-operation and remote surgery, supply chains, human behavior, chemical processes, machine tool chatter. In this research activity, students will work with a ball-beam dynamics experiment that is functional in Dr. Sipahi's lab. On this experimental set-up, students will test how artificially introduced delays in the sensors will deteriorate controller's performance and eventually lead to instability. With respect to different control laws, students will extract how much of delays in the sensors can be tolerated before instability occurs (delay margin). Furthermore, students will analytically calculate delay margins and compare these findings with those obtained from the experiment. See the presentation of Mike and Ben - PPT |
