Game Synopsis: The ‘Who Am I’ game helps you to perceive probabilities in terms of sets of features: The “chance” is a randomly-drawn mystery card with the identity of one of the characters hidden. The “choices” are what questions you ask to eliminate characters from consideration, based on their features. By a process of elimination you can identify the mystery character. The “consequences” are the number of questions it takes for you to identify the character. This is your score. You can be lucky or unlucky but, if you play multiple times, it is your skill at choosing the right questions that determines how well you do in the long run. See how computing conditional probabilities pays off. You can choose to play the basic or conditional game. The game can be played in Firefox or Chrome.

Game Synopsis: Design, analyze and optimize your own amusement park. It looks simple: just drag and drop attractions onto a design layout of the park. But there are complexities: you need to please three different groups of consumers (families, teens, and seniors). You can grow your ticket sales but be careful: queues for the attractions can grow rapidly and ruin the experience for all. Finding a good balance for your objectives is an important part of any design. In lecture or a workshop we will explain the tools used in constructing the game: consumer choice models, queueing network models, and feedback control.

Game Synopsis: Jack Muckstadt’s Multi-Item Kanban Game illustrates an innovative way to manage inventories in multi-item capacitated production systems. You start with managing a simple single-item system and progress to a sophisticated multi-item system using the CONWIP principle. Your challenge is to minimize the finished goods inventory needed to achieve a target fill rate. You may even discover for yourself the so-called “No B/C Policy” which we teach in our courses.

Game Synopsis: “Plans are nothing but planning is everything.” When a disaster strikes you must marshal vehicles, equipment, teams and supplies to meet the needs. You must quickly put into place a multi-day plan. But as the disaster evolves you must update your plan and re-prioritize the use of your resources. Multiple disaster scenarios are available, from the simple to the complex.

Game Synopsis: The Distribution Game is a classic game in optimizing the use of inventories in a product distribution network. You control a central warehouse and allocate your inventory among multiple retailers making sure they do not run out of stock while maximizing your profit. The game also introduces the Cumulative Flow Plot which is an effective graphical tool for revealing inventory policies from data.

Game Synopsis: The Hospital Patient Flow Game is a flow analysis game in which you must pick up patients and move them through a hospital from one treatment area to the next until they are finally discharged. Whoever moves the required number of patients through the hospital fastest wins. It sounds simple but it is a fast-paced game and there are tricks to saving time.  But it is also an educational game: you will learn a fundamental concept of analysing flow in engineering systems: the so-called “Little’s Law.”  So come take a first step into engineering systems analysis and have fun doing it.

Game Synopsis: The Schedule Crasher Exercise comprises of a project with seven activities, and your aim is to complete this project in less time than originally planned. Some project activities must be completed before other activities can start. You can crash a project schedule by adding people to help on the different project activities but you will have to deal with concepts of ‘decreasing returns to scale’ and ‘slack vs critical activities’ in project scheduling. Learn the optimization technique of marginal analysis to achieve an optimized solution!