Modeling and simulation

About: Modeling and simulation is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 10273 publications have been published within this topic receiving 111550 citations.

Layout and material flow optimization in digital factory

Abstract: The ability to realize customized products, in particular for engineering-to-order companies, is a key factor in order to be competitive in modern market without incurring any additional cost and respecting customer lead time. In this ever-changing environment the layout optimization is a fundamental issue requirement, hence the development of a virtual layout, according to the Digital Factory concepts, can be very useful to identify and to solve potential problems during the planning phase, before realize it. The main aim of this paper is represented by the proposal of a layout reconfiguration and a technological solution for the parts feeding system of the industrial plant analysed in order to reduce the production lead times. In the first phase, an overview of the Digital Factory applications is provided. In the second phase, after data analysis in an Italian manufacturing company, a simulation model has been designed and tested using Simio simulation software. Simulations results concerning production and queue times obtained from different orders have been compared with actual configuration data. Research results indicate that the surveyed company has had an improvement in terms of reduction of waiting times and increase of customers satisfaction due to total production lead time reduction. (Received in May 2015, accepted in November 2015. This paper was with the authors 5 months for 1 revision.)

Modeling and simulation of storage area networks

Abstract: Storage area networks (SANs) are an emerging data communications platform which interconnects servers and storage devices (such as disks, disk arrays, and tape drives) to create a pool of storage that users can access directly. This networking approach reports benefits such as computer clustering, topological flexibility, fault tolerance, high availability, and remote management. In order to evaluate the performance of these systems it is necessary to have the adequate tools. Usually, performance evaluation may be based on analytical modeling or simulation. Each of them differs in their scope and applicability. However the simulation modeling technique offers more freedom, flexibility, and accuracy than the analytical methods. Thus, when evaluating the performance of SANs, simulation modeling should be used. In this paper the issues involved in the modeling and design of a very flexible and easy to use SAN simulator are presented. This tool is able to consider among others, both real-world I/O traces and synthetic I/O traffic, message packetization, faults in links and switches, virtual channels, different routing algorithms, etc. We describe its main internal organization, the basic modeling mechanisms the simulator is based on, the main input parameters and output performance variables. Also, the analysis of preliminary results using I/O traces is presented, showing that the storage network increases self-similarity of the traffic received by servers, latency variations are more important for control messages than for data messages, and links have a low utilization.