Component-Basd Approach for Manufacturing Simulations

摘要

Manufacturing systems can be very complex and are often costly to develop and operate. Simulation technology has been shown to be an effective tool for optimizing manufacturing system design, operations, and maintenance procedures. However, each manufacturing simulation is usually developed to address a specific set of industrial issues, and may only apply to a small portion of a complex manufacturing system. To enable manufacturers to more easily use simulation technology to solve complex manufacturing issues, this paper defines a reference architecture for component-based simulation (RACS). With the architecture, complex manufacturing systems are functionally partitioned into smaller interacting subsystems, and simulations of those subsystems are combined to form a federated simulation of the overall manufacturing system. This enables the simultaneous analysis of different aspects of each of the simulated subsystems and the overall manufacturing system.