2000: the Sdi Industry Product Suite: Simulation from the Production Line to the Supply Chain

The SDI Industry®Product Suite is a versatile, high-level simulation toolset for solving problems of whole enterprises. It adds important capabilities to an existing simulation package, Extend™, which provides a robust simulation architecture and a wealth of existing building blocks. The SDI Industry Product Suite contains 5 specific elements for modeling the enterprise: SDI Database for high-speed data import/export; SDI Industry for highspeed, high-volume production line modeling; SDI Plant Builder for multi-stage plants driven by schedules; and Supply Chain Builder for supply/distribution chains. Each of these elements can be built upon to model everything from a single packline to a worldwide supply chain. 1 SDI DATABASE: MANAGE LARGE AMOUNTS OF DATA The SDI Database adds to Extend the capabilities of a general-purpose embedded database. The database addresses fundamental challenges associated with data management. In many projects there has been the need to manage large quantities of data, such as in problems where many products are produced, and where there are extensive relationships between tables of data. Many users want to manage model data using Excel. The model needs to dynamically access data in an extremely fast manner. Multiple blocks within the model need to deal with the same data such as for product or process attributes, so there needs to be a global model data structure supporting a decentralized block-based system. Figure 1 below shows a typical SDI Database table which contains data on the changeover times required when changing from one ice cream flavor to another. The database capability in SDI Database is comprised of an Excel add-in and a system of Extend blocks. All model inputs can be defined in an Excel workbook, with 20 multiple tables defined on different sheets in the workbook. SDI Database’s Visual Basic add-in provides a menu for aiding the user in defining and navigating tables. Model execution speed is addressed by embedding the data from Excel in a Database Manager block in Extend. This allows instantaneous memory-resident access to data, and the ability to ship models without the need for Excel. Database-aware blocks then address model-wide access. The Database Manager and all database-aware blocks know the complete structure of all tables and their data. Popup menus can be used to specify tables and fields within database-aware blocks. A table viewer is provided within Extend for viewing and editing data. Figure 1: Typical SDI Database Table The idea of having a centralized database within a model that uses decentralized blocks in its construction may seem like a contradiction. However, similar to the debate between centralized and decentralized government, great power and flexibility rests in the combination of the