Model Sharing in the Simulation and Control of Distributed Discrete-Event Systems

Today, sophisticated discrete-event systems are being designed whose complexity necessitates the employment of distributed planning and control. While using a distributed control architecture results in the overall system model consisting of a collection of independent models, today's commercially available simulation languages can only accommodate a single model. As a result, in order to use these simulation languages one must create a new system model that consists of a single model but yet models a collection of models. Typically the communication among the distributed models is ignored causing inaccurate results. In this paper we use our simulation concept, also presented in this paper, to create a simulation tool that enables the simulation of distributed systems by using a collection of models rather than a single model. With our concept we create a methodology that accomplishes this by simulating the communications among the distributed models. Besides the benefit of not having to create a new model for simulation, this methodology produces an increase in accuracy since the communication among the models is taken into consideration. Furthermore this tool has the capability to control the system using the same collection of