No abstract

The definition of the High Level Architecture (HLA) some years ago made possible interoperability for a wide range of simulation systems and applications. However, as there are different possible ways to use HLA for performing the same task; real and easy interoperability is still not a reality.HLA was born as a military standard, but it soon became a very important tool in non-military applications. In fact, the industry has understood that more standardization efforts are needed to obtain true interoperability between the industry COTS simulation packages, defining Interoperability Reference Models in the SISO CSPI PDG standard (SISO Commercial-off-the-shelf Simulation Packages Interoperability Product Development Group standard). These models propose universal patterns for using HLA in the most common interoperability environments for manufacturing applications.In this paper, a new Interoperability Reference Model is proposed for Entity Transfer in military applications. Furthermore, this model has been tested on a specific HLA RTI implementation and its use has been exemplified in a real world interoperability environment.

No abstract

Lean Manufacturing initiatives try to understand where the sources of waste are in a manufacturing process in order to minimize or avoid them and to add value to the stakeholders. The improvement actions related to lean methods are always incremental, fast and easy; mainly based on people's experience and on simple tools. For example, a Value Stream Map (VSM) is created to have a visual representation of the material and information ¤ows involved in the production process, allowing improvement teams to detect where is the waste introduced and where is the value added. The integration of simulation with VSM could considerably improve the results obtained in lean projects, helping the decision makers in adding dynamic information to the usually considered static pictures of the processes. The information obtained from what-if simulations allows to detect improvement opportunities, to prioritize them, to analyze the best implementation alternative, and to quantify the possible bene£ts of the proposed actions. This work presents the LeanSim framework, an easy to use tool based on Matlab and Simulink, capable of integrating a lean method such as VSM with simulation. Furthermore, a case study of an improvement project at a milk production plant is presented to illustrate the utilization of this new framework on a real environment.

The concept of Zero Latency Enterprise (ZLE) has received considerable attention through the last years. Many companies and organizations want to see the value of this kind of strategy before changing their IT infrastructure to implement ZLE solution. This paper proposes a new project methodology defining five main steps that should be followed to success in ZLE implementation projects. One of these steps, the Planning and Decision Making stage, is based on simulation techniques, allowing a comparison of the organization performance with and without ZLE strategies. Furthermore, in this work the different approaches for the ZLE simulation are examined and discussed.