Agent-based communication to map and exchange shop floor data between MES and material flow simulation based on the open standard CMSD

Abstract

Simulation of manufacturing systems is state of the art in many companies. The simulations are used to optimize processes, to plan alternative solutions before a shop floor modification is realized or to test PLC programs. In all these cases, the simulation program has to represent the real shop floor processes and the corresponding machinery as well as possible. In this paper, we present a method to parameterize a simulation model with real-time shop floor data collected by an MES (manufacturing execution system). The approach uses autonomous agents based on JADE (JAVA Agent Development Framework) as system connectors. The agent communication is based on the open SISO (Simulation Interoperability Standards Organization) standard CMSD (Core Manufacturing Simulation Data) as exchange format which can be represented in XML.