Manufacturing shop-floor supercomputer for distributed simulation and control

Distributed Arrival Time Control (DATC) is a new class of algorithm for real-time decisionmaking and control in manufacturing enterprises. Applications of DATC include production scheduling, maintenance scheduling, transportation routing, inventory control, supply chain management, etc. DATC is a highly distributed feedback control approach that uses feeback from simulations to iteratively refine and improve decisions. There are two fundamental simulation approaches that can be used for providing feedback to DATC: Distributed Event Simulation (DES) and Distributed Time Scaled Simulations (DTS). Both the techniques have their advantages and disadvantages. DES is suitable for sequential computing and does not scale well to parallel architectures. DTS is communication intense and but is ideal for parallel/distributed architectures. The objective of our research is to develop custom reconfigurable computing architectures using field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) for advantageously using inherent parallelism in DATC/DTS. DATC/DTS has well defined communication protocol that requires communication network such as Ethernet to support message passing. The current work is an implementation of DATC/DTS over a distributed FPGA platform interconnected over a fast Ethernet. This architecture eliminates the communication protocol and operating system overhead that typically limits the scalability of general-purpose computers.