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Ch53-I044963.fm Page 261 Tuesday, August 1, 2006 4:09 PM
Tuesday, August
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4:09 PM
1, 2006
Ch53-I044963.fm
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ENHANCED DISTRIBUTED-SIMULATION USING ORiN AND HLA
2
1
Toshihiro INUKAI , Hironori HIBINO , Yoshihiro FUKUDA 3
'FA Engineering Department, DENSO WAVE Inc.,
1-1 Showa-cho, Kariya-shi, Aichi 448-8661, Japan
2
Technical Research Institute of JSPMI,
1-1-12 Hachiman-cho, Higashikurume-shi, Tokyo 203-0042, Japan
Faculty of Engineering, Hosei University,
3-7-2 Kajino-cho, Koganei-shi, Tokyo 184-8584, Japan

ABSTRACT

Recent manufacturing industries face various problems caused by the shorter product life cycle, the
higher demand for cost and quality, the more diversified customer needs and so on. In this situation, it
is very important to shorten the lead-time of the manufacturing system construction. Therefore, the
manufacturing simulation has been watched with keen interest. However it is used only for the design
stage of the construction. It is not useful for the implementation stage because of a proprietary
simulation language, a complex modelling, etc. Our goal is to develop a simulation environment
which can be used easily throughout the manufacturing system life cycle. Our approach is based on a
distributed architecture, ORiN and HLA. This simulation environment is composed of some
manufacturing simulators, real FA devices in the factory, its emulators and so on. By distributing them
into one simulation environment on the network, a large-scale simulation and a highly accurate
simulation are achieved.

KEYWORDS
Manufacturing systems, Distributed simulation, Virtual factory, ORiN, HLA

INTRODUCTION

Manufacturing simulations are very important to shorten the lead-time of the manufacturing system
construction. However, the manufacturing system simulator is not useful at an implementation stage.
One of the main reasons is that the simulation models which are made at the design stage cannot be
reused at the implementation stage. Therefore, a virtual factory at the design stage and a real factory at
the implementation stage cannot be combined efficiently in the system development process.

To solve this problem, current simulators are trying to integrate many functions into themselves. For
instance, some robot simulators have the function to convert the simulation language to the