A structured approach for the implementation of distributed manufacturing simulation

Manufacturing has been changing from a mainly in-house effort to a distributed style in order to meet new challenges owing to globalization of markets and worldwide competition. Distributed simulation provides an attractive solution to construct cross enterprise simulations to evaluate the viability of the proposed distributed manufacturing enterprises. However, due to its complexity and high cost distributed simulation failed to gain a wide acceptance from industrial users. The main objective of this paper is to address these issues and present a new structured approach to implement distributed simulation with cost effective and easy to implementable tools. A simplified approach for model partitioning for distributed simulation is also included in the proposed approach. The implementation of distributed manufacturing simulation is illustrated with Arena, Microsoft Message Queue (MSMQ) and Visual Basic for Applications (VBA).