MLPro-MPPS - A Versatile and Configurable Production Systems Simulator in Python

In the current era of automation, there has been a growing interest in integrating artificial intelligence into manufacturing systems. A digital representation of the systems is often important to develop, test, and implement learning algorithms. However, developing a digital representation that seamlessly integrates with artificial intelligence remains challenging. The majority of existing simulators lack the capability of such integration or are not available as open-source platforms. To overcome these challenges, we propose MLPro-MPPS, a versatile and configurable Python-based production systems simulations framework integrated with the established machine learning framework, namely MLPro. MLPro offers advanced templates for machine learning in both scientific and industrial contexts, where both MLPro and MLPro-MPPS are open-source frameworks. In this paper, we present the design and fundamentals of MLPro-MPPS, which accurately models the behaviour of real hardware. We demonstrate the potential of MLPro-MPPS in facilitating standardized machine learning within production system simulations and conduct two sample applications of production systems within multiple machine learning methods. The results show that MLPro-MPPS offers a clean and reproducible simulation framework.