Establishing a factory simulation system for cloud-based simulation services
Toly Chen, Yu-Cheng Wang, Abbas Al‐Refaie · International Journal of Internet Manufacturing and Services · 2015
Simulations are effective tools for enhancing factory competitiveness. However, performing simulations requires a considerable amount of expertise, time, effort, and a large budget. Thus, many factories are resorting to cloud-based simulation services as an alternative. To facilitate realising this trend, this study established a factory simulation system for cloud-based simulation services. The proposed system imports factory and simulation scenario data in extensible markup language (XML) format through a cloud service provider (CSP), and an output report is generated in XML for export onto the CSP. An experimental simulation system was established to demonstrate the applicability of the proposed methodology. The experimental results support its effectiveness. The proposed methodology also facilitated the transfer of a factory simulation task to a simulation cloud that was more available and had stronger computation capability.