On January 10, 2013, the first edition of the conference was held at the Faculty of Management of the AGH University of Science and Technology in Kraków. The goal of the “1st Symposium on Process Simulation and Optimization in FlexSim – FlexSimposium-PL-2013,” as the event was titled at the time, was to present the possibilities of applying the FlexSim environment in three areas that should be closely integrated with one another: teaching, scientific research, and business practice.
The official opening of FlexSimposium-2013-PL took place at 11:30 a.m. and was presided over by the Dean of the Faculty of Management, Dr. hab. inż. Piotr Łebkowski, Prof. at AGH University of Science and Technology, who noted the high level of interest in the event among students, faculty, and representatives of the business community. Subsequently, a total of four papers were presented during two plenary sessions. Dr. Grzegorz Wróbel introduced Symposium participants to the topic of modeling and simulating logistics processes by presenting a paper on simulation methodology based on Prof. A. Greenwood’s book Applied Simulation – Modeling and Simulation Using FlexSim. Next, Dr. Paweł Pawlewski, Eng., presented the possibilities offered by the use of FlexSim General Purpose software, particularly in teaching, and the benefits that can result from it. The next two presentations—by Dr. Patrycja Hoffa-Dąbrowska, M.Sc. in Engineering, and Dawid Dąbal, M.Sc. in Engineering, who were then young engineers and are now recognized experts—focused on the potential applications of the FlexSim Container Terminal Simulation and FlexSim Health Care environments. The presentation portion of the conference concluded with summary presentations by Dr. Witold A. Cempel and Dr. Jerzy Mikulik, Ph.D., Eng., Professor at AGH University of Science and Technology, who discussed, among other things, the principles of the FlexPhD program.
Even the first edition of the Conference combined a traditional format—namely, a plenary session where participants listened to presentations by several speakers from various research centers—with a training component: two parallel, two-hour training sessions were held, during which participants learned the basic principles of building simulation models in the FlexSim environment.
The first edition lasted a total of 6 hours and generated significant buzz in the scientific and business communities, which prompted the Cempel Consulting team to organize a second edition.
