A Distributed Search and Simulation Method for Job Flow Scheduling

Abstract

Simulation serves as an effective decision support tool in flexible manufacturing systems for understanding and analyzing the effect of changes to the system environment. Due to the variety of situations that have to be evaluated, a generative scheduler for such a system must be more flexible than its realistic equal while still producing detailed and accurate schedules. This research presents a possible solution to this problem and is intended for use in a distributed, reactive, virtual environment. The solution exploits the advantages gained by using multiple processes in a distributed environment to create, simulate, and evaluate possible schedules. The system is designed on the premise that a distributed parallel search and simulation of competing schedules with accompanying heuristics and subgoaling will greatly reduce the search space and control the state space explosion. Moreover, the need for cycle and deadlock detection is eliminated, thereby decreasing the overall complexity and computational requirements .

Reducing myopic behavior in FMS control: A semi-heterarchical simulation–optimization approach

“…Simulation can be employed off-line and/or integrated in online control strategies (Leitão et al, 2012a;Cardin and Castagna, 2009). Off-line simulations can be used for solution validation, parameter sensitivity analysis and evaluation of robustness and performance, usually on the control design process (Jernigan et al, 1997;Smith, 2003). Conversely, online simulations are suited for anticipating deviations and prospectively analyzing multiple scenarios and strategies, before a decision is made (Pfeiffer et al, 2008;Monostori et al, 2010).…”

A Distributed Agent-based Simulation Environment for Interference Detection and Resolution

“…The above survey is a brief introduction into some recent agent-based implementations of simulation applications. For a detailed introduction on agents, their definitions, capabilities, and other applications, the reader is referred to [16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25] and references therein. For the radar interference model used in this paper for the detection and resolution of interference, the interested reader is referred to [1,[26][27][28].…”