Integrative Simulation Of Information Flows In Manufacturing Systems

Factories consist of different elements (e.g. machines) that are connected through material, energy and information flows. For material and energy flows, methods and tools to support their planning and operation are already available. In contrast to that, from manufacturing perspective there is a strong demand for augmenting support to consider information flows as well. This is of specific importance given the current developments in context of digitalization, with more complex and dynamic IT-architectures. Against this background, the paper presents an approach to simulate information flows (besides material/energy) in manufacturing systems which is also applied in a case study. (C) 2019 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.