A distributed virtual factory in agile manufacturing environment

There is a growing recognition that current manufacturing enterprises must be agile, that is, capable of operating profitably in a competitive environ ment of continuously changing customer demands. The use of a virtual enterp rise (VE) is becoming increasingly prevalent, and that has been made possib le, in part, due to the significant advances in communication and informati on technology in recent years. A manufacturing system is one of the competi tive factors that forms an effective VE. Therefore, for manufacturers wishi ng to obtain a contract in VE, it is crucial to present attractive and comp etitive offers to other coalition members. There are several criteria to th ese offers, such as cycle time, fulfilment of due date or quick shipping da te, cost, and quality assurance for the ordered products. Manufacturing sys tem simulation could endorse the basic estimates of the criteria for the st rategic offer. The distributed simulation model concept provides practical solutions to facilitate such a large-scaled precise simulation model in the VE environment, because it is constructed as the integration of several ma nufacturing simulation models of each production module in the factory. As a solution to realize this integration, we propose a Distributed Virtual Fa ctory (DVF) concept that consists of distributed precise simulation models connected by several synchronization mechanisms named Time Bucket algorithm s. A DVF enables precise evaluations of the whole manufacturing system, esp ecially in terms of the material flows. In this study, we introduce an Acti vity Based Costing (ABC) method into the DVF architecture to estimate the d etailed cost analysis of the products. The methodology facilitates strategi c enterprise management to prepare the request for the bids in the VE envir onment. The effectiveness of the proposed concept in agile manufacturing is discussed with simulation experiments.