A parallel object-oriented manufacturing simulation language

When used to simulate manufacturing systems, most existing parallel simulation languages cannot easily implement some features of those systems, such as the scheduling rules of a machine or the sharing of operators by multiple machines. The paper presents the design and implementation of a parallel object oriented manufacturing simulation language, called POMSim. A POMSim simulation is developed by using the concept of classes (entity types) and inheritance to support iterative design of efficient simulation models. POMSim completely hides all the details of parallel simulation, and provides simple and direct constructs to efficiently model the scheduling rules in manufacturing simulations. It also provides asynchronous method invocation and synchronous function call. POMSim libraries predefine a set of basic classes for manufacturing simulation, each of which represents a particular component in the physical manufacturing system.