Development of a process model simulator

Process modelling and simulation are modelling techniques available to support companies in gaining a better understanding of their manufacturing systems' behaviours and processes and therefore helping them in decision making. This paper reviews a number of existing process modelling approaches and it introduces the EPSYLON process modeller. The motivation for developing the EPSYLON process modeller was to: (1) provide a tool tailored to modelling manufacturing operations; (2) provide a tool that uses high semantic modelling and therefore is easy to use by non-expert personnel; and (3) provide a manufacturing operations description tool that could integrate with other software modules such as simulation, monitoring, scheduling, maintenance and recycling to support the day-to-day operations of a manufacturing facility. This paper also describes the development of the EPSYLON simulator that integrates with the EPSYLON process modeller. The EPSYLON simulator is a highly customised simulator which was developed using the Taylor Enterprise Dynamics (TED) simulation package. The paper describes the EPSYLON simulator developed, elaborates on why TED was chosen for the project, and comments on the experience of using this package.