Web based evaluation of material handling alternatives for automated manufacturing: a parallel replications approach

This paper describes the application of a master/slave configuration of processors to study a comparison of alternative material handling configurations for automated manufacturing. Such a study usually requires a large number of simulation replications, and carrying out those replications on a multi-processor platform yields significant savings in elapsed time. In the present application, a master processor carries out the statistical computations for a 2k factorial design on up to eight slave processors. This paper will compare the results from using two, four and eight processors.