RIGA TECHNICAL UNIVERSITY

FACULTY OF COMPUTER SCIENCE AND INFORMATION

TECHNOLOGY

Fundamentals of Computer Simulation and Modelling

Essay

Providing the Ukrainian Armed Forces with ammunition

FCSIT
International Student
Oleksandr Maletskyi
Stud. ID Nr. 171ADB155
 Many countries nowadays are known for their capability to produce ammunition for their
armed forces as well as producing them for some other purposes, such as business, meaning to
sell the ammunition to some other countries (legally) that are not able to manufacture such
products by themselves. Ukraine, a country in Eastern Europe was also well-known for being a
country that, to this day, is one of the biggest exporters of ammunition as well as other sorts of
military hardware. One of the main reasons why the country was selling those kind of products is
because the government as well as the Ministry of Defense saw that the arsenals all over the
country were full and there was no need to use the majority of that ammunition in the near
future, that being military exercises or peace-keeping operations abroad. By the end of 2014 the
Ukrainian government faced a problem. Before this the country had the potential to produce
ammunition for the soviet-made weapons by itself (7,62mm rounds). But when the government
decided to make reforms so that the country would later on join NATO, which meant that the
military would have to use NATO’s standard ammunition (5,56mm), they had to make a decision
either to buy it from countries already in the organization or to build a completely new
ammunition plant somewhere in the country for production of ammunition for the military,
which would take more time but simultaneously would decrease the cost of actually buying or
placing the order for the ammunition. The cost of building such a factory could be compensated
by selling the ammunition to other countries that are already members or partners of the military
organization in the future. The government made a decision of building the plant in the central
part of the country and said that it would be ready by 2026. After the plant would be built there
would also need to be a plan for the allocation of the newly manufactured products to the
military bases. For this we are going to create a simulation of a system for completing the task of
transporting and allocating the products.

Each and every country in the world has their own way of doing specific things when it
comes to logistics. In order to understand how and why we implement different strategies we
have to first understand the meaning of the term “logistics.” Logistics is a detailed organization
and implementation of a complex operation or situation. When talking about logistics, we also
have to take in account the understanding of transportation and supply chains, since they play a
very important role for building and simulating situations of logistics and transportation systems
that are composed of one or more terminals or hubs connected by a set of traffic lanes.
Transportation is a term that we are mostly familiar with, which means to carry someone or
something to a different place with a specific destination by means of transport, such as cars,
trucks, planes, ships, etc. A supply chain, a term similar to the previous one but has more to do
with management and organization, is a system of elements, such as organizations, people, and
resources involved in moving a product or service from supplier to a customer.

In our case we will be building a system for supplying a country’s military bases with
ammunition. Afterwards the system will be ready for analysis and making improvements by
making theoretical experiments. To start off, we first have to build some sort of scheme to
illustrate what our system would look like. But before that we would have to declare what will be
the elements in our system. Usually elements in systems are entry points (where the input comes
in), queues for waiting for some work objects to be processed in another element of a system and
activities, where the products or work objects are worked on. Typically the procedure of
allocating and providing the ammunition for the military is that first it is stored in the warehouses
that are owned by the factory that’s responsible for manufacturing the ammunition. Then the
 customer, in this case ministry of defense of the country, places an order for a specific number of
rounds. The ammunition is then loaded onto some transport (usually trucks) which gets sent to an
arsenal in a specific region. The ordered rounds are then stored there for a while until they have
the numbers that they wanted and then it is decided to which military base and how much
ammunition should be sent there. So for our system the entry point will be the factory where the
ammunition will be produced and it will have a specific value of the amount of rounds being
manufactured in a specific period of time (run time). After the entry point we will have queue for
puting the crates with the ammunition into the warehouse next to the factory, where 1 crate is
about 2000 rounds. After the warehouse there will be a queue for loading the crates into the
trucks on the truck docks. There will be 3 truck docks so that the system would be more efficient
in the process. Then the crates in the trucks will travel to the arsenal where the crates will be
stored for a specific period of time until it will be decided to which military base the crates
should be sent off to. The military base would be the end point of our system. In our scenario,

however, we will use only one arsenal and one military base for easier understanding of how the
system works.

Figure 1Model of the simulation

When talking about simulations we also have to mention some words about the aim and
objective of the simulation that were planning to analyze. The aim of the simulation would be
what we are planning to achieve as a result from this, which in our case would be to simulate a
logistics and transportation system for providing a country’s military base with newly produced
ammunition from the factory. The objective of this simulation would be how we are going to do
it. For this we would create a model of the simulation to better understand how the simulation
would run and what would be the main elements in it, then define the input, which would also be
the main work object of the system, define other data, such as constant data, random variables
and random events. We would also need to consider the approaches for preparing the input data
that would be used throughout the whole runtime of the system. The output data has to be
analyzed after the complete run of the simulation as well and specifically stated what exactly will
be the output data as a result. After running the simulation it would be helpful to do some
theoretical experiments with the simulation so that we would know what would be the best
version of the system. To do this, the easiest thing to do would be to either to increase or
decrease the number of elements since it would affect the efficiency of the entire system. But we
could also experiment with the system by changing some data, like changing the number of
ammunition rounds produced in the factory. Finally, the last thing to do after all this would be to
analyze the simulated system and its results.

When building a system of any kind we always have to consider what would be used as
an input data for it. In this case, since we’re planning on building a simulation for a system of
logistics and transportation for providing a military base with ammunition produced in a factory
the input data would be the amount of ammunition produced in a factory. This data would be
transferred throughout the whole runtime of the simulation. Some private or government
companies/factories like to have additional reserves in their warehouses in case of emergencies
or change of plans in terms of business (customer orders more of the product than the last time)
but for the sake of simplicity there won’t be any reserve system implemented in this simulation.
In order to imagine how much rounds of ammunition the factory can produce in one day we have
to take into perspective another ammunition plant that’s already been busy with producing
ammunition for their military. For example, the Lake City Army Ammunition Plant, a US
government-owned plant located in the state of Missouri produces about 1.4 billion rounds of
ammunition per year, 20 million per week and about 4 million per day. These numbers are a bit
big to work with so we will use a bit smaller numbers for our simulation.

Also, when entering the data into the simulation we also have to identify what data is
constant and what data is random. Constant data is that allows you to create data records that can
be saved and later be applied to both borrowing and lending requests, meaning that it stays the
same no matter what throughout some situation or operation. Random data is some data that has
the tendency to change during the run0time of a situation/operation such as time of arrival of
some unit. In order to successfully build a simulation of some sort of system it would be helpful
to first build a table of objects and parameters of the simulation model. This would help in
keeping track of what kind of data we have to deal with and how we should manipulate this data
so that the simulation would be built correctly.

Simulation Description Parameter values Features

object
Entry point Incoming number of Exponent. distr. (1 min)
ammunition (in
crates). A fixed
variable of 650
crates.
1st queue Queue for the crates Unlimited capacity. FIFO.
 to be transferred to a
warehouse.
Warehouse Place where the Uniform distr. (lower Batch size: 650
crates are stored for bound: 1 min;
some time after upper: 2 mins)
production.
2nd queue Queue for the crates Unlimited capacity. FIFO.
to be loaded onto the
trucks.
Truck docks Each truck can carry Uniform distr. (lower Batch size: 50
50 crates at bound: 1 min;
maximum. upper: 2 mins)
3rd queue Queue for the crates Unlimited capacity. FIFO.
to be unloaded at the
arsenal.
Arsenal Place where the Uniform distr. (lower Batch size: 650
crates are to be bound: 1 min;
located until all of the upper: 1.5 mins)
ammunition arrives.
4th queue Queue for the crates Unlimited capacity. FIFO.
to be transferred to
the military base.
Military base Final destination of
the ammunition.
Figure 2 Objects and parameters of the simulation model

From this table we can now see the precise data that is going to be used in the simulation.
The specified batch sizes above are implemented in the simulation because in a real-life situation
it would be unordinary to see each crate being sent in a truck one by one. The batch feature
allows us to complete the whole activity without sending some work unit to another activity
straight away, meaning that a certain activity where the batch feature is implemented will be
completed only after a specific number of items have been processed in that activity. In this
simulation we can observe that the warehouse activity will only be completed when there will be
all of the 650 crates of ammunition inside. Same goes for the truck docks and the arsenal. The
only constant data variables in the simulation are the incoming number of crates of ammunition,
exponential distribution for the entry point, which means that every minute there will be a new
crate waiting to be processed, and the specified number of batches in several activities, such as
the warehouse, truck docks and the arsenal. The random variables in this case would be
processing time of each and single crate at the three activities of warehouse, truck docks and the
arsenal. Their processing time for a single crate ranges from 1 minute to 2 minutes in the
activities of warehouse and trucks docks, and from 1 minute to 1.5 minutes at the arsenal. To
make the simulated system more realistic we can also add a working shift during which the
workers allocate the crates with the ammunition and a rest time during which they take a rest.
We can set the shift duration from 00:00 to 24:00 and set the rest time from 18:00 until 08:00.
After creating these we can implement them into the simulation by adding the working shift and
a rest time for every activity. The outcome of this simulated system will be the transported crates
of ammunition to the final destination, which would be the military base. Since this is a
simulation for a logistics and transportation system and our main objective was to build a system
for relocating a certain product from one location to another the output should be equal to the
input of the system. This means that if the order was placed on 650 crates of ammunition the
number of crates delivered to the military base in the end would also have to be equal to 650. If
one crate takes to process about 1-1.5 minutes in each activity then it would take more than 10
hours to process 650 crates (650 minutes = 10.8 hours). This means that it would take at least 4
days to transport the ammunition from the factory to the military base. In order to check this we
would have to run the simulation for 5 days or 7200 minutes and see how the system would run
and what would be the output (how many crates will there be in the end).

After running the simulation for a few times and recording some data it is always great to
experiment with the built simulation to see how will it perform if it were to be created in a
different way. To do this we could analyze which of the activities has the biggest influence on
the system if they were to be changed or manipulated. Activities such as the warehouse and truck
docks are the ones that influence the efficiency of the whole system the most. For example, if we
were to decrease the number of truck docks, it would take much longer to transport the crates
with ammunition to the military base. But if the number of truck docks was increased the system
would be more efficient and the products would be delivered earlier than before. There would
also be the same affect on the system if the number of warehouses was increased, since each
crate wouldn’t have to be processed one by one. This experimentation of the simulation could be
conducted theoretically because it’s not that hard to pinpoint which areas of the system are the
most important ones when it comes to the efficiency and sufficiency. Other methods for
experimentation can be done by changing the constant and random variables of the system and
later observing how it will affect the final outcome of the simulation after running it. After
making these experiments we could observe which version of the simulation would be the best
scenario by comparing the data of the simulations after running them. If the second version of
the simulation, created with changing the amount of some activities is better than the first one
than we would use the second version for implementation of simulating a real-life
situation/operation.
 References
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supply_chain

http://www.uh.edu/~lcr3600/simulation/app-lt.html#trans

https://www.scss.tcd.ie/~houldinb/Index/Simulation_files/sslides2.pdf

https://www.simio.com/academics/student-projects/logistics/20131228-Deciding-Where-To-
Build-A-New-Distribution-Center/

http://www.uh.edu/~lcr3600/simulation/app-lt.html

http://www.uh.edu/~lcr3600/simulation/contents.html

https://www.simul8.com/support/help/doku.php?
id=model_building_basics:simulation_objects:storageareas

https://help.oclc.org/Resource_Sharing/WorldShare_Interlibrary_Loan/Constant_data/Constant_
data

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YaI01-1vV0M&t=77s