Abstract for:Strategic facilities space management modeling for better decision support

Sandia National Laboratories (Sandia) is a Department of Energy Federally Funded Research and Development Center which provides critical engineering and scientific support to a variety of US Government (USG) agencies. A broad range of facilities spread across 2 main campuses and 6 ancillary locations support Sandia efforts.

Managing, preparing, and predicting future needs at spread out sites is complex. Further adding to complications are:

Rules governing Sandia’s acquisition of space—sometimes requiring a congressional line item;

USG efforts to “freeze” and reduce the federal government footprint[1];

The high-security nature of the work making telecommuting unfeasible at a large scale; and

The many dynamic processes that govern hiring, clearing individuals, and securing funding.

There is a lack of readymade tools that can simulate USG specific future space needs and help organizations manage and optimize their facilities. Therefore, Sandia is developing system dynamics and optimization-based tools to aid decision-making in its centralized facilities policy.

This presentation describes the central logic underlying the system dynamics tool, explains the dimensional complexity involved with developing an operations model, demonstrate the current state of these tools, describes insights, and describes future developments for this project.