Material Flow Meta Model-driven Simulation for the Production of Discrete Manufacturing Plant

With the increasing complexity and diversity of the production process in modern manufacturing, the composition of the manufacturing system for the demand of multi-species small-lot production is more complex and the material flow is irregular, which makes it difficult to ensure the flexibility of the material flow modeling and the accuracy of the simulation process. For this reason, a method based on Material Flow Meta Model (MFMM) is proposed to simulate the production process of the discrete manufacturing plant. Based on the seven-element (SE) modeling theory, the MFMM model is further defined to describe the material flow and control mechanism; a process interaction simulation algorithm based on the MFMM is designed to simulate the material flow process; a corresponding prototype system is developed to support the proposed method. An intelligent manufacturing workshop is used as an example to validate the proposed method. The experimental results show that compared with Flexsim, the proposed method achieves 99. 8% simulation accuracy on average, and has certain advantages in the flexibility of material flow modeling, which proves its effectiveness and practicability in complex manufacturing environments.