A methodology for automating the parallelization of manufacturing simulations

One of the main reasons why parallel discrete event simulation has not been adopted more widely in industry is that the terminology used by the parallel simulation community differs from that of industrial simulation practitioners. The paper shows how the gap between these two communities can be bridged by presenting a methodology for automating the parallelization of manufacturing simulations. Our approach provides a way of automatically generating a mapping from a sequential simulation model to an efficient parallel implementation. The results of this mapping can be expressed in a form which is independent of any particular parallel simulation system or language. Since it is easy to generate code for different simulation systems, it is possible to evaluate alternative parallel simulation protocols at an early stage of development. A prediction of the performance can thus be obtained by studying the behaviour of an abstraction of the simulation model with various strategies or on different computing platforms.