Enterprise modeling and simulation platform integrating manufacturing system design and supply chain

In this paper, we propose enterprise modeling and simulation platform integrating manufacturing system design and supply chain. Through the analysis of an enterprise model integrating them, we have found that an enterprise is too complicated to simulate because there are various execution frequency and many types of information flow. We have overcome the difficulty of simulating a complicated enterprise model by using the agent-oriented language, “ROPL”. This platform has three features. 1) It realizes a suitable design of an enterprise model under the interaction between manufacturing system design and supply chain. 2) Users can evaluate a design result by simulating an enterprise model. 3) By adapting CORBA, it enables a communication environment, which makes this platform practical. The simulation experiments demonstrate that our developed platform can be employed in complicated enterprise simulation. This paper describes the details of new enterprise modeling and simulation methodology on this platform. After the details, we discuss applicability of simulation integration methodology through an application example