Modeling decision making and control in manufacturing simulation

A significant shortcoming of traditional simulation languages is the lack of attention paid to the modeling of control structures, i.e., the humans or systems responsible for manufacturing planning and control, their activities and the mutual tuning of their activities. Mostly they are hard coded and dispersed throughout the model. Consequently, not only realism but also modeling flexibility and modularity is harmed. In recognition of this fact we consider a framework for simulation modeling that explicitly represents control structures in terms of intelligent agents, their activities and their relationships. The modeling framework is meant to set guidelines for more disciplined model building and to serve as a conceptual basis for extending capabilities of simulation tools. To study the practical relevance of the framework for manufacturing simulation its concepts were implemented in an object-oriented simulation language and applied to a case example. (c) 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.