Evaluate simulation design alternatives for large scale manufacturing systems

Distributed simulation promises to achieve significant parallelism in computation, which is essential in modeling wafer fabs in sufficient detail to support fab design or operational policy decision making. The high level architecture (HLA) is used to synchronize the simulation computations on networked computers. In designing a research and development testbed called the high fidelity virtual environment for 300 mm wafer fab (HiFiVE), we considered alternative different ways to distribute computational tasks to computers. This paper proposes an evaluation approach to select promising alternatives for further detailed development. Computational results show that properly distributed computational tasks can lead to substantial improvements