Analysis and enhancement of planning and scheduling applications in a distributed simulation testbed

Planning and scheduling applications and operations simulation models jointly represent the manufacturing activities of an enterprise. This paper relates to a framework that enables integration of both into a unified model and allows improvement of their performance with discrete event simulation (DES) technology. The high level architecture, which is the IEEE standard for interoperability of simulations, forms the backbone of this framework in which business applications can be reused with operations simulation models to generate an integrated simulation model. This enables a company to optimise not only operational processes such as shop floor or warehouse operations but also business processes such as planning, order management and scheduling through simulation using the same software infrastructure. A case study to demonstrate the feasibility of this framework is included and ongoing work on implementation of this framework in an industrial environment is presented.