TOWARDS AUTOMATED SIMULATION INPUT DATA: AN OPEN SOURCE TOOL TO ENHANCE THE INPUT DATA PHASE IN DISCRETE EVENT SIMULATION

摘要

Discrete Event Simulation (DES) is one of the most effective tools for planning, designing and improving material flows in production. One of the main weaknesses of operating DES is the exertion needed and costs spent on collecting and handling the input data from different organization's data resources. To tackle the problem of the time consuming input data process for DES projects a tool, called Knowledge Extraction (KE) tool is developed. The open-source (OS) tool reads data from several resources of an organisation; analyses it using statistical analysis and outputs it in a format that is applicable to be used by a simulation tool. The tool can export the already processed data in formats readable to simulation software in order to cover the increasing need to integrate simulation with other manufacturing applications; the primary one follows the Core Manufacturing Simulation Data (CMSD).