An HLA-based distributed simulation for networked manufacturing systems analysis

Abstract

Manufacturing systems can be thought as production networks nodes whose relations have a strong impact on design and analysis of each system. Commercial simulators are already adopted to analyse complex networked systems, but the development of a monolithic model can be too complex or infeasible when a detailed description of the nodes is not available outside the ‘owner’ of the node. Then the problem can be decomposed modelling complex systems with various simulators that interoperate in a synchronized manner. Herein, the integration of simulators is addressed by taking as a reference the High Level Architecture (HLA). This paper proposes modifications to Commercial-off-the-shelf Simulation Package Interoperability Product Development Group protocols and to use patterns of how HLA can be effectively adopted to support Commercial Simulation Package interoperability: a new solution for the synchronous entity passing problem and modifications to the Entity Transfer Specification are presented. The resulting infrastructure is validated and tested over an industrial case.

Keywords:

• complex manufacturing systems
• discrete event simualtion
• distributed simulation
• HLA
• interoperability reference models

Acknowledgements

The research reported in this paper has received funding from the European Union Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreement No: NMP2 2010-228595, Virtual Factory Framework (VFF). The authors would like to thank Prof. S.J.E. Taylor for his on-going scientific support and Prof. S. Straßburger for the precious suggestions during the PADS workshop. Authors acknowledge Tenova Pomini for the definition of the industrial case.