Innovative Production Machines and Systems Conference

Testing on real equipment is very expensive. Simulation of manufacturing processes helps find out best possible configuration of the production process even if the real equipment doesn’t exist. Extension or reconfiguration of the existing processes can be tested and evaluated before investment takes place. Validation of the plans in the simulated environment can also bring significant benefits. Proposed simulation system makes use of advantages of the agent technologies such as high flexibility and modular architecture, openness and easy reconfiguration. Simulation system allows testing several configurations of production processes and locates  bottlenecks or possible problems. Using different planning techniques with different configurations allows adapting the planning algorithms and finding the best plan for the appropriate configuration. All the experimental results can be analytically evaluated and used for improving production processes. On the other hand, real data gathered from the real processes shall be applied back on the simulation model to improve its accuracy.