An Evolutionary Approach to Rapid Development of Simulation Models

创新制造系统的有效设计是一项艰巨的任务。这不仅是因为制造商通常无法提前了解生产成本和可靠的工艺时间，而且捕获、存储和重用最佳实践制造工艺也不容易。财务投资的水平可能是巨大的，而糟糕的系统设计的后果可能对整个企业造成灾难性的影响。离散事件仿真，或更通俗地说，是工业家在制造设计和再设计过程中可以应用的最有用和最有价值的工具之一。这种仿真模型通常包括机器，部分流程，操作规则，时间表，输送机和人的表示，然后预测的生产设施的性能方面的措施，如生产量，制造提前期等，虽然仿真技术已经在英国超过30年，证据表明，他们的使用在制造业是相对较低的。这主要是因为a）与桌面应用程序相比，仿真工具更难以使用，因此需要特定的技能来操作它们，B）仿真工具通常对于所解决的问题能力过大，并且购买昂贵，以及c）构建、验证和确认模型是耗时且资源密集的。这项研究试图解决的挑战是如何提高模拟技术的吸收在英国的制造业通过积极破坏的障碍，通过减少模型开发时间的模拟使用。该研究的新奇推动了快速仿真模型开发领域当前研究的边界。拟议的研究将通过以下方式从以前的工作中提供知识的实质性进步：1。探索使用分支和进化分析作为制造系统分类的基础，并使用模拟解决问题。研究了一种基于典型制造系统和待解决问题快速生成仿真模型模板的新方法.将“模型构建”的概念转变为“模型组装”，其中模型元素可以从随时可用的组件库中检索，并自动生成完整的模型，以加快模型开发。

The effective design of innovative manufacturing systems is a difficult task. This is not only because manufacturers usually do not have any way of getting early visibility of production costs and reliable process times, but also capturing, storing and reusing best practice manufacturing processes are not easy. Levels of financial investment can be immense and the consequences of poor system design can be catastrophic to the whole business. Discrete-event simulation, or simulation as it is more popularly known, is one of the most useful and worthwhile tools that industrialists can apply during manufacturing design and redesign. Such simulation models typically include representations of machines, part flows, operation rules, schedules, conveyors and people, and then predict the performance of manufacturing facilities in terms of measures such as production volume, manufacturing lead-time, etc.Although simulation techniques have been around for more than 30 years in the UK, evidence suggests that their usage within manufacturing industry is relatively low. This is mainly because a) compared to desktop applications, simulation tools are much more difficult to use and thus require specific skills to operate them, b) simulation tools are often overly-capable for the problems being addressed and are expensive to acquire and c) building, verifying and validating the models are time consuming and resource intensive. The challenge this research attempts to address is how to improve the uptake of simulation techniques within the UK-based manufacturing industry by positively disrupting the barriers of simulation usage through reduction of model development time. The novelty of the proposed research pushes the boundary of current research in the area of rapid simulation model development. The proposed research will provide a substantial advancement of knowledge from previous work by:1. Exploring the use of cladistics and evolutionary analysis as a basis of the classification of both manufacturing systems and the problems being addressed using simulation.2. Investigating a new way of rapidly generating simulation model templates based on both typical manufacturing systems to be modelled and the problems to be addressed.3. Shifting the concept of 'model building' towards 'model assembling', where model elements can be retrieved from a ready-to-use component library and the complete model will be generated automatically in order to speed up the model development.