Title: A hybrid environment for real-time distributed manufacturing control benchmarking

Authors: Robert W. Brennan, Karthik Soundararajan

Addresses: Department of Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering, University of Calgary, 2500 University of Calgary, Calgary, Alberta T2N 1N, Canada. ' Department of Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering, University of Calgary, 2500 University of Calgary, Calgary, Alberta T2N 1N, Canada

Abstract: In this paper we propose a hybrid physical/simulation environment for benchmarking real-time distributed control systems that uses Arena Real Time for simulation and the Java-based TINI platform for real-time control. This system is intended to allow holonic- and agent-based systems to be evaluated across the entire manufacturing enterprise from planning and scheduling to real-time control. The paper provides an overview of the experimental system and reports on our preliminary results with a manufacturing benchmark. These results show that by incorporating actual physical devices in the simulation environment, effects that are often difficult to quantify such as communication latency and processor latency can be observed.

Keywords: simulation; real-time control; intelligent control; distributed manufacturing; distributed control; manufacturing control; benchmarking; holonic-based systems; agent-based systems; multi-agent systems; communication latency; processor latency; holonic manufacturing.

DOI: 10.1504/IJISE.2006.009796

International Journal of Industrial and Systems Engineering, 2006 Vol.1 No.3, pp.412 - 428

Published online: 12 May 2006 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article