An intelligent simulation environment for manufacturing systems

The manufacturing field is an area where the application of simulation is an essential tool for validating methods and architectures before applying them on the factory floor. Despite the fact that there are a great number of simulation tools, most of them do not take into account the specific requirements of the “new manufacturing era” such as distributed organization, interoperability, cooperation, scalability, fault tolerance and agility. On the other hand, Multiagent System technology has demonstrated its utility in manufacturing system modeling and implementation. Agenthood features such as proactivity, reactivity, and sociability may also be useful for associating them with the specific simulation needs of the new changing requirements for manufacturing systems. In this paper, an Agent-supported Simulation Environment for intelligent manufacturing systems is presented. The different roles that are played by the agents of the simulation environment are defined taking into account the specific dynamic features in manufacturing simulation and the requirements of the new manufacturing era. Moreover, the interaction and cooperation scenarios among these agents are specified to facilitate manufacturing simulation in an appropriate and flexible way. A detailed evaluation study, with regards to the new manufacturing era requirements, demonstrates the advantages of the proposed approach over current state-of-the-art proposals.