Factory flow design and analysis using internet-enabled simulation-based optimization and automatic model generation

Despite simulation offers tremendous promise for designing and analyzing complex production systems, manufacturing industry has been less successful in using it as a decision support tool, especially in the early conceptual phase of factory flow design. If simulation is used today for system design, it is more of-ten used in later phases when important design decisions have already been made and costs are locked. With an aim to advocate the use of simulation in early phases of factory design and analysis, this paper introduces FACTS Analyzer, a toolset developed based on the concept of integrating model abstraction, automatic model generation and simulation-based optimization under an innovative Internet-based plat-form. Specifically, it addresses a novel model aggregation and generation method, which when combined together with other system components, like optimization engines, can synthetically enable simulation to become much easier to use and speed up the time-consuming model building, experimentation and optimization processes, in order to support optimal decision making.