Abstract
As manufacturing systems are being created on larger and more complicated scales than ever before, it is increasingly necessary to have opportunities to design the manufacturing system with several persons concurrently. In this case the designers often use suitable simulators for evaluating their assigned subsystems. After the subsystems are modeled and evaluated, it is necessary to integrate the subsystems as a whole system and evaluate them. In order to evaluate the complete manufacturing system, designers need to create the manufacturing system model by synchronizing several different simulators. One of the methods to synchronize simulators is a distributed simulation system. The purpose of this research is to develop a distributed simulation environment which can be used easily by manufacturing system designers. In this paper, we propose a manufacturing system adapter to connect manufacturing system simulators with HLA/RTI like a plug-in style. A case study for the proposed adapter is then carried out to evaluate the performance of the cooperative work using three different simulators.
