Animation of a job shop scheduling process

In this paper, the authors show how visual, interactive simulation modeling can be used to understand the complex behavior of scheduling heuristics in a job shop. Extensive simulation of the dynamic scheduling problem convinced them that a shop floor animation yields considerable insights that are not available in traditional statistical analysis. They show how the analysis of a system moves from the problem domain, to an engineering model, to a mathematical model, to a discrete event simulation state-space and finally to an event-space that can be animated. The inclusion of the event-space animation provides a valuable communication tool that can be used to validate a model and its structural relations as well as to help explain the results of the modeling analysis. They share their experience with visualization and the results of a two-year study where animation modeling dramatically improved their research results