Modeling control decisions in manufacturing systems simulation using objects

Control software is acknowledged as the biggest bottleneck in integrating modern manufacturing systems. We argue that understanding the interactions between parts, equipment, and supervisory control processes in the functioning of manufacturing enterprises is critical to the development of control software. We discuss a modeling environment which provides a platform for describing manufacturing control in terms of control entities and their interactions with their clients, and provides a rich representation of the manufacturing world in terms of object-oriented development of system components. The modeling environment is useful for rapidly prototyping manufacturing systems simulation. In this paper, we briefly describe the modeling architecture focusing on the concepts and implementation of the decision making controller entities in the architecture