Parallel discrete-event simulation of a supply-chain in semiconductor industry

This paper describes our work on the study of how parallel discrete-event simulation techniques can be applied in a supply-chain simulation. A supply-chain simulation model consists of multiple virtual factory models. Each virtual factory model executes integrated simulation of the manufacturing and business processes and communications network to allow one to analyze the effects of different system configurations and control policies on actual system performance. Since a supply-chain model will have a large problem size and take a long time to run, it is natural to consider the use of parallel discrete-event simulation techniques (PDES) to reduce its execution time, so that the simulation results can be obtained in a reasonable amount of time. This project uses PDES on real-world manufacturing data-sets. A parallel simulation protocol is developed to exploit the shared memory hardware for conducting supply-chain simulation.