An intelligent simulation environment for manufacturing systems

Abstract

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.

Agent-Based Simulation of Value Flow in an Industrial Production Process

“…Ruiz et al [47] present an evaluation of the most used software simulation tools for manufacturing systems, as Arena, Extend, Microsaint, Quest, Witness, FlexSim, and Promodel. The results of [45] include the advantages of using the agent paradigm.…”

Mapeamento do fluxo de valor e uso da simulação integrada lean com sistemas ciber-físicos em uma indústria de embalagens flexíveis

“…Um modelo de simulação é uma réplica reduzida ou simplificação de um conjunto de variáveis de um sistema real (MIHRAN e MIHRAM, 1974;BANKS et al, 2000). Ruiz et al (2014), os modelos de simulação têm o potencial de prover mais do que a informação que é requerida e reduz os riscos no projeto, análises e a operação em sistemas complexos. Muitas das ferramentas de simulação são focadas para resolver problemas relacionados ao planejamento de manufatura.…”

Multi-Agent Simulation of Hydraulic Transient Equations in Pressurized Systems

“…The growing trend in recent years (Dibley et al 2011, Nguyen et al 2012, Ruiz et al 2014, Zhang et al 2014, is to include multi-agent techniques as an interesting alternative for solving complex problems. Multi-agent techniques have been widely used in water the field (the authors' field of expertise) such as allocation of scarce water (Hailu and Thoyer 2005); water and waste water control system architecture (Maturana et al 2006); control systems for municipal water (Kotina et al 2006); water pollution diagnosis (Nichita and Oprea 2007); optimization of water networks (Cao et al 2007); water management at river basin scale (Mikulecký et al 2008); river basin water allocation management (Yang networks (Montalvo et al 2011(Montalvo et al , 2014.…”