Modeling and simulation of auction-based shop-floor control using parallelcomputing

The high level of complexity and cost involved in the development, testing, and implementation of software for traditional, hierarchical shop-floor co ntrol of automated manufacturing systems has motivated considerable researc h in recent years on the distributed shop-floor control paradigm. In this p aper, we describe a methodology for modeling and simulation of an auction-b ased shop-floor control scheme in a parallel and distributed computing envi ronment using the Parallel Virtual Machine software library. Compared to tr aditional discrete-event simulation, this approach provides a more accurate means for modeling and evaluation of the shop-floor behavior under distrib uted control, and enables rapid prototyping of the actual control software. We discuss the challenges and highlight research opportunities associated with modeling and simulation of distributed shop-floor control systems usin g parallel and distributed computing.