Simulation of complex manufacturing systems via HLA-based infrastructure

Manufacturing systems can be thought as production networks nodes whose relations have a strong impact on design and analysis of each system. One of the most common techniques to support these tasks is Discrete-Event Simulation. The state-of-the art commercial simulators are already adopted to analyze complex networked systems, but the development of a monolithic simulation model can be too complex or even infeasible when a detailed description of the nodes is not available outside the "owner" of the node. In these cases the problem can be decomposed by modeling complex systems with various simulators that interoperate in a synchronized manner. Herein, the integration of simulators is addressed by taking as a reference the High Level Architecture (HLA) and the research carried out by Commercial-off-the-shelf Simulation Package Interoperability (CSPI) Product Development Group (PDG). This paper proposes modifications to CSPI-PDG protocols and to use patterns of how HLA can be effectively adopted to support CSP interoperability: a new solution for the synchronous entity passing problem and a modification to the Entity Transfer Specification are presented. The resulting infrastructure is validated and tested over a realistic industrial case.