Distributed Simulation in Manufacturing Using High Level Architecture

Abstract

Manufacturing is a critical industry for all major economies. Every individual and industry depends on manufactured goods, which makes manufacturing crucial to the national economies. Competition is increasingly hard and globalization is leading to worldwide distribution of production, products and services, affecting all countries and economical regions. At the same time, markets are changing. Customers call for faster product changes and demand products, which are increasingly targeted to individual needs. Mass production is therefore replaced by customised and personalised production of individual products. Distributed simulation has the potential to become widely applicable for geographically-dispersed manufacturing environments, as is the case with desktop manufacturing or rapidly deployable micro-assembly stations. This thesis focuses on creating a generic framework that permits the distribution of manufacturing simulations, which was one of the goals of the MS2Value (Modeling and Simulation of Manufacturing Systems for Value Chains) project. Companies, nowadays, normally have their activities and resources geographically dispersed, which represents a challenge for the reusability and interconnection of their manufacturing simulation models. Different approaches have been taken by different communities like the research and military community, but no solution has been presented yet in the manufacturing field. The thesis work presented here proposes the use of the HLA (High Level Architecture) in combination with a simulation software as a solution to these problems. This proposal is demonstrated by an implementation of a distributed simulation using 3DCreate and an open source RTI (Runtime Infrastructure). /Kir10