Optimization of manufacturing processes by distributed simulation

The paper describes a simulation-based optimization system for manufacturing processes. The principle suitability of simple Threshold Accepting and Great Deluge Algorithms for optimizing practical manufacturing systems is shown, as well as the possibility of parallelizing of these algorithms. A special IP Multicast architecture is introduced which allows the simulation model to be extended to multiple clients and so the efficiency of the optimization algorithms to be increased by concurrent simulation. Each client can log on or log out at an optimization server at any time so that it should be possible to use the idle computer capacity of a single production department or a whole company. The optimization server is implemented as an experimental option in the simulation system simcron MODELLER®, which is particularly used in electronics and semiconductor manufacturing.