Modelling and Simulation of a Material Flow System
Ulrich A. Nickel, Jörg Niere · 2001
Modern production control systems, e.g. a factory for cars or any other complex industrial good face two major problems. First, the systems need to become more decentralised to increase their availability. Second, the markets force the demand of smaller lot sizes and more flexibility to produce different goods in parallel. Nowadays, re-configuration of production control systems consists of two parallel tasks, i.e. the hardware reconstruction and the software development. However, the software is tested on the real hardware and this raises long down times of the whole system. These down times are the main problem of a re-configuration, because they produce the highest costs. To reduce the testing phase costs, we present an approach to simulate the control software of a production control system beforehand. We illustrate our approach on a model of an existing material flow system, which is a major part of a production control system. Our emphasis in this paper relies on the simulation facilities of the modelled system, whereas our modelling approach is discussed in previous work. We introduce a generic layer architecture and a process oriented simulation kernel for certain hardware properties to get a realistic simulation.