Putting the magic in the machine since 1980.

Friday, May 14, 2010

Software Engineering Projects


I am often surprised at what a small group of our Senior Computer majors can accomplish in one semester, while taking four other classes, looking for a full time job and, in many cases, also working a part time job. But, they do some pretty amazing things in my CSCE 492 class.

The first group this semester decided to build an iphone app. None of them had any experience with the Mac, or objective-C, or the xcode IDE, nor did any one of them even own a Mac! Still, none of this matters much. They quickly came up to speed on objective-C (which has similarities to many of the languages they learned in other classes) and managed to build a game that is better than many of the games in the app store. I expect their skills will be much in demand. In fact, I know they are.

The second group built a Ruby on Rails applications that interfaced with the Amazon and the Facebook API's and used mysql, jQuery and had other javascript niceties. Only one of the students had experience with Ruby on Rails, and none had used web APIs before. It was another large learning and doing experience.

Still, aside from the technical knowledge they acquired, what they always tell me they learned most is how to work in a team and coordinate their time so as to get large projects like these done. That is not something that can be learned in a lecture.

Friday, May 7, 2010

SeaPort Container Terminal Simulation

Port of Long Beach

Next week I will be presenting our (with Nathan Huynh) paper on agent-based seaport container terminal simulation at the workshop on agents in traffic and transportation.

Basically, we used netlogo to build a simulation of a container seaport terminal, like the one you see on the photo. We focused only on the decision-making process of the cranes. Those large cranes you see have to pick up the containers and place them on the trucks as they arrive. Since the cranes are slow and there are many trucks the crane operators have to trade-off several competing interests when making their decision: trucks want to get out of there as quickly as possible, it takes the crane a long time to travel the length of the seaport, the port manager wants to maximize the number of trucks served but without making any one truck wait too long.

In this paper we tried the more obvious utility functions to see how they performed in a seaport with 2 or 3 cranes. The utility functions used are:

  1. distance-based: roughly, go to the nearest truck, but avoid getting on the way of the other cranes,
  2. time-based: roughly, serve the trucks on a first-come first-serve based, while trying to stay out of the way of other cranes,
  3. a mixture of the above two.

Test results showed that the distance-based won, by a lot. It won not only on the throughput, as it obviously would, but also on the fairness measures, which is not so obvious.

I'll be putting up the netlogo model on my MAS Netlogo models page soon. The slides from the talk I'll deliver on Tuesday are below:

We are currently working on expanding this model, both from a programming, simulate more parts of the supply chain, and the analysis side, put some bounds on the solution quality that can be achieved assuming local control and local information.