A STUDY ON DISTRIBUTED SIMULATION SYSTEMS TO EVALUATE MANUFACTURING SYSTEMS USING HLA

摘要

As manufacturing systems are being created on larger and more complicated scales than ever before, it is increasingly necessary to design a manufacturing system with several persons concurrently. In order to evaluate the manufacturing system, the designers need to make the manufacturing system model by synchronizing several different simulators. However currently it is difficult for designers to make and evaluate a complete system model by synchronizing all subsystem models because there are no standard descriptions for simulation models and a standard language for simulation programs has not been developed. Therefore research on distributed simulation systems has become necessary. Concerning the distributed simulation system, there are many research papers in academe. But there are only a few cases of practical applications of the system in industries. Therefore it is necessary to develop the distributed simulation system which is easy to use so that various industries can access this system. In this research, the distributed simulation system to easily evaluate a very large manufacturing system by synchronizing several different simulators is developed. We designed the dis-tributed simulation system using High Level Architecture(HLA) as IEEE 1516 standard. A manufacturing adapter to connect manufacturing system simulators with HLA using a plug-in style is proposed. A case study for the developed distributed simu-lation system is then carried out to evaluate the performance of the cooperative work.