Decision making agents in manufacturing systems simulation: examples

The authors present the implementation details of the simulation models built using an environment called the intelligent manufacturing simulation agents tool (IMSAT). IMSAT is a prototype tool developed to model the decision making functions in discrete event simulations. The philosophy of this tool is to model the organization as a whole, inclusive of both the shop floor functions that produce the goods and the decision making functions that control the operation. The IMSAT environment provides an object-oriented knowledge representation scheme called intelligent agents to model the decision making functions. Through some examples, the nature of the role of intelligent agents is described as a part of manufacturing system simulations