Hierarchical modeling of a shipyard integrated with an external scheduling application

This paper presents a hierarchical approach on the simulation of large-scale discrete event systems used recently by the Kiran Consulting Group (KCG) to model shipyard operations. Because of the dynamic, stochastic and complex nature of the shipbuilding processes, bottleneck identification and estimation of the impact of new technology implementation is extremely difficult to derive via analytical methods. The simulation model of a large-scale discrete event system can be considered as a collection of sub-systems, which are represented by the simulation models that are independently created, modified, and saved. This approach also includes methods that integrate these sub-models into an overall model in order to run different scenarios and identify global performance measures.