Interoperability for virtual manufacturing systems

As manufacturing systems are often costly to develop and operate, simulation technology has been demonstrated to be an effective tool for improving manufacturing system design and the efficiency of manufacturing operations and maintenance. However, effectively and efficiently using simulation remains an important issue in the manufacturing industry. One of the principal reasons is the difficulty in processing, organising, and making use of the production-related information about the manufacturing system to be simulated. The difficulty stemmed from no standard representation for such data, making the effort to input data such as product attributes, processing times, and material quantity requirements into simulations complex, time consuming, and error prone. The core manufacturing simulation data (CMSD) standards, SISO-STD-008-2010 and SISO-STD-008-01-2012, specifically address this data representation issue. CMSD enables the import/export of many different types of factory data into computer simulations and other manufacturing systems. This paper describes the motivation for creating CMSD, standardisation efforts for CMSD, and related research efforts. This paper also describes how CMSD could be used as an integration mechanism in a sustainable manufacturing test-bed being developed at the National Institute of Standards and Technology. The test-bed will be a virtual manufacturing environment to support the testing and validation of sustainability metrics, assessment methods, and tools for use in manufacturing.