Abstract
Discrete-event simulation has become one of the most widely used analysis tools for large-scale, complex and dynamic systems such as supply chains as it can take randomness into account and address very detailed models. However, there are major challenges that are faced in simulating such systems, especially when they are used to support short-term decisions (e.g., operational decisions or maintenance and scheduling decisions considered in this research). First, a detailed simulation requires significant amounts of computation time. Second, given the enormous amount of dynamically-changing data that exists in the system, information needs to be updated wisely in the model in order to prevent unnecessary usage of computing and networking resources. Third, there is a lack of methods allowing dynamic data updates during the simulation execution. Overall, in a simulation-based planning and control framework, timely monitoring, analysis, and control is important not to disrupt a dynamically changing system. To meet this temporal requirement and address the above mentioned challenges, a Dynamic-Data-Driven Adaptive Multi-Scale Simulation (DDDAMS) paradigm is proposed to adaptively adjust the fidelity of a simulation model against available computational resources by incorporating dynamic data into the executing model, which then steers the measurement process for selective data update. To the best of our knowledge, the proposed DDDAMS methodology is one of the first efforts to present a coherent integrated decision making framework for timely planning and control of distributed manufacturing enterprises.To this end, comprehensive system architecture and methodologies are first proposed, where the components include 1) real time DDDAM-Simulation, 2) grid computing modules, 3) Web Service communication server, 4) database, 5) various sensors, and 6) real system. Four algorithms are then developed and embedded into a real-time simulator for enabling its DDDAMS capabilities such as abnormality detection, fidelity selection, fidelity assignment, and prediction and task generation. As part of the developed algorithms, improvements are made to the resampling techniques for sequential Bayesian inferencing, and their performance is benchmarked in terms of their resampling qualities and computational efficiencies. Grid computing and Web Services are used for computational resources management and inter-operable communications among distributed software components, respectively. A prototype of proposed DDDAM-Simulation was successfully implemented for preventive maintenance scheduling and part routing scheduling in a semiconductor manufacturing supply chain, where the results look quite promising.