Towards automated simulation input data

Discrete Event Simulation (DES) has proved itself to be an effective tool for complex processes analysis. The drawback of using DES is the effort required and costs spent on collecting and processing the input data from different data sources. To address the problem of time consuming pre-coding for DES projects, a tool based on Core Manufacturing Simulation Data (CMSD) is currently being developed. The tool will read data from several resources of an organisation; analyse it using statistical analysis and output it in a format that is applicable to simulation purposes. The format that we adopted follows the CMSD standard in order to describe simulation related data. The CMSD specification is presented as simulation input, in order to achieve the efficient reuse of this data for future DES projects. We present a first prototype and a test implementation of this tool and we draw conclusions about the future steps of our project.