A federation object coordinator for simulation based control and analysis

This paper presents an architecture and a design for a federation object coordinator (FOC) for simulation based control and analysis. This research focuses on developing a methodology for implementing a distributed simulation control mechanism which can be adopted to virtual manufacturing or virtual enterprises. In this method, distributed fast or real time simulation models interact with low level controllers and among themselves to actively control a system. The timing and coordination requirements of the simulation models to interact with the MRP systems and control systems as well as the interaction among the distributed simulation models are discussed in this paper.