Applied Distributed Discrete Process Simulation

With the growing scale and complexity of simulation projects, stand-alone simulation models are becoming too limited to support the design phase in a sufficiently valid way. Besides that there is a trend to combine separately developed models and extend the use of modeled software to prototyping or even real environments. This paper describes an open, easy and general concept for distributed modeling and simulation. The concept is suitable for research, educational and commercial design environments. The concept does not require special hardware or study and is, for the sequencing part, completely transparent to the simulationist. It is implemented in the free and open source simulation tool 'TOMAS', which is based on the process approach for discrete event simulation. To show a concrete example, the concept is applied to a dimensioning problem for AGV systems.