A Federated Simulation Framework for Cross-Organisational Processes.

Abstract

Simulation is a significant tool to evaluate, monitor and enhance the processes and to predict the behaviour of a system in a particular scenario. Collaborative processes involving multiple organizations are becoming important in the changing landscape of the manufacturing industry towards industry 4.0. Simulating these processes require independent and distributed execution because of the privacy concerns of partner organizations and re-usability of existing simulators. In this paper, we propose a simulation framework based on federated approach for the simulation of collaborative processes. The federated approach enables the simulation of parts of processes from multiple organizations by combining independent simulators through a common interface. The common interface is responsible for the synchronization of all the simulators within the federation. The framework will be evaluated using industrial case study of textile manufacturing using Virtual Organizations.