A Discrete Event Simulation Of The Joint Space Cell

The Australian Defence Force (ADF) has formed a joint space cell (JSC), to develop a set of information products to provide space situational awareness (SSA) for the Australian Defence Organisation. The JSC responds to information requests that can arrive from any agency or group within Defence. The ADF is considering different resource allocation options to enhance the capabilities offered by the JSC. To this end, we are investigating the characteristics of the relationship between the quantity of allocated resources and the rate of output through the following analytical questions:1. What are the expected waiting times of customers requesting SSA products, given the current production process and operator allocation?2. How many operators could be efficiently utilised within the JSC, given the existing processes for producing SSA products?3. Is it possible to achieve significant reductions to customer waiting times through the automation of a subset of SSA production processes?This paper reports on problem formulation, modelling and simulation approach, data acquisition and interim results. We have taken a queueing systems approach to model the operational mechanics of the JSC. We treat the operation of the JSC as a manufacturing process for information products. The JSC produces a portfolio of products and operates with a single queue and multiple servers. We have used the JSC's email traffic to characterise one of the arrival parameters of the queue. The service time that each customer experiences depends upon the product that is requested.The results from the email analysis indicate that the exponential distribution may be used to model the daily arrival of emails into the JSC. The simulation output indicates a combination of deterministic and stochastic behaviour which is consistent with the use of the triangular distribution for generating service times.Preliminary results indicate that DES is a reasonable approach for modelling the JSC and will provide a capability to aid decision making.