A methodology for development of simulation-based production schedule generation systems

Describes structured methods, techniques, and experiences which make it possible to rapidly tailor a simulator-based planning or scheduling system to the specific needs of a company. The methods include the function modeling technique IDEF0 and the information modeling technique IDEF1, with the IDEF1 syntax modified to incorporate additional notation for objects, rules, and comments. Flowcharts to describe logic, and decision trees may be created to model conditions and actions. The method is based on advanced simulation modeling techniques and relational database techniques. The approach is to use a general-purpose simulation language combined with database methods to dynamically search and select orders from a pool of orders. Each order is an object defined by its attributes. Additional information necessary for the order selection is contained in one or more databases maintained and updated by the simulation. The databases are initialized and generated from external files, which are drawn out of existing MRP systems and/or other company databases. The order selection is based on order-attributes as well as system status information, which are detected from the simulation model