A distributed time-driven simulation method for enabling real-time manufacturing shop floor control

Abstract

This paper proposes a distributed simulation approach for scheduling discrete-events in manufacturing shop floors. The proposed approach employs a time-driven method to simulate occurrence of discrete-events using distributed entities that replicate physical entities in the manufacturing shop floor. In specific, the proposed approach iteratively controls the timing of discrete-events occurrence using a control theoretic model. In this approach, changing the speed of the simulation clock, termed time-scaling factor, can accelerate or decelerate the simulation speed resulting in simpler synchronizations of discrete-events and faster simulation than standard distributed discrete-event simulations according to the capability of the communication networks. Computational experiments are conducted to test the performance of the proposed system with different values of the time-scaling factor, and the relationship between the system performance and the time-scaling factor is investigated through analysis of the system model. Results obtained from the computational experiments show significant successes in speeding up discrete-event simulations in such a way that the proposed approach can be used for the control of manufacturing shop floors, providing real-time decision supports.