The Challenge

This company cultivates biological organisms in a series of interconnected ponds. As the organisms grow, they require more space, necessitating their transfer to larger ponds with increased water capacity. This transfer can be facilitated in two ways: naturally, by allowing water and organisms to flow via gravity, or mechanically, using pumps. While pumps accelerate the process, they also result in some organism loss. Since the organisms grow over an extended period, they transition through a sequence of progressively larger ponds. The following image illustrates this system, where larger ponds accommodate the growing organisms at each stage.

Additionally, ponds require frequent cleaning, and some ponds might become unusable because of failure, which means that whenever this happens the transferring sequence has to be adjusted.

The challenge is to understand what sequence to use and what technology to use in order to maximize throughput.

The Solution

As this project requires a considerable number of configuration options, we developed a model in AnyLogic with an Excel input file to generate scenarios. Each scenario requires dynamic concepts for each pond that are very different and are subjected to physical equations based on gravity or pump capabilities. For that reason we developed a hybrid model using a combination of agent-based and system dynamics, and a snippet of the system dynamics model can be seen in the following image:

For validation purposes we developed a 3D and a 2D version of the ponds connected through the system dynamics information. On the following image we see how density changes in each pond, where the red color signifies a density of organisms that reach a critical threshold. In general this has to be avoided as this blocks or slows down the growing of the biological organisms.

Results

As this project cannot be disclosed in detail to show the results of the project, it’s relevant to state that as the raw information from the process was exported from AnyLogic, we developed a very complete and comprehensive dashboard using PowerBI to display comparisons between different scenarios. The following image shows a snippet of these comparisons, with 2 scenarios named “218” and “230”, each scenario displaying results that are easily comparable for operation and strategic purposes, but also to communicate the decisions to stakeholders.