DISTRIBUTED SIMULATION ENVIRONMENT TO EVALUATE MANUFCTURING SYSTEMS ALONG ENGINEERING PROCESSES

In this paper, a distributed simulation environment (DSE) to evaluate manufacturing systems along engineering processes is proposed. DSE realizes synchronizing manufacturing system simulators at a design stage, our past developed simulation environment which can simulate facility behaviours while synchronizing virtual factory models and real controller equipments at an implementation stage, and operational applications at a manufacturing system execution stage such as operation management systems. Specially the ORiN-HLA gateway in DSE to combine two different standard network architectures as HLA and ORiN is proposed and developed. Using DSE, ranges of evaluation items on computers along engineering processes are significantly extensible.