Discrete event simulation for shop floor control

The paper describes an application of discrete event simulation for shop floor control for a flexible manufacturing system. In this application, the simulation is used not only as an analysis and evaluation tool, but also as a "task generator" for the specification of shop floor control tasks. Using this approach, the effort applied to the development of the simulation is not duplicated in the development of the control system. Instead, the same control logic is used for the control system as was used for the simulation. Additionally, since the simulation implements the control, it provides very high fidelity performance predictions. Implementation experience in two flexible manufacturing laboratories is described. These implementations use a special feature of the Arena/SIMAN simulation language which allows Arena/SIMAN to interact directly with the shop floor control system through an interprocess communication mechanism. This feature is described in detail.