Real-time decision making using simulation

Based on a discrete-event simulation model, simulation-based real-time decision-making (SRDM) is an innovative approach to real-time, goal-directed decision-making. When applied to a flexible manufacturing system, SRDM makes better decisions than most fixed policies, such as deterministic, stochastic and manual. SRDM even improved over fixed policies optimized within a class of policies by OptQuest, in our numerical experiments. Compared to these fixed policies, SRDM shows greater improvement for more complex systems and is quite robust with respect to modeling errors. SRDM provides an improvement over fixed policies by its ability to implement adaptive policies. Since most real-time decisions in currently deployed manufacturing systems are made either manually or by using fixed policies, our results suggest that using SRDM instead could lead to significant improvement in operating performance.