DREAM | simulation based application Decision support in Real-time for Efficient Agile Manufacturing

As its main objective DREAM is to increase the competitiveness of the European Manufacturing Sector through targeting the advancement of discrete event simulation technology beyond the current state of the art to promote the embedding of simulation based decision support across the array of multi-level decisions faced by European Manufacturing Enterprises, from strategic (product/process development), tactical (ERP decision level support) and down to the MES level with the requirement of reactive real time decision support. 

1. To engineer a semantic free open simulation application development platform to support the wide adoption of simulation based applications by European Manufacturing Companies – a platform that will allow manufacturing companies themselves, consultancy firms, the open source community and researchers deliver beyond current state-of-the-art simulation decision support applications to the European Manufacturing Sector.
2. To address the multi-faceted barriers to the adoption of advanced simulation decision support technologies by manufacturing companies, especially SMEs, by developing methodologies to address system knowledge management and  human-system interaction.
3. The DREAM project will use the semantic free simulation application platform to implement novel applications to support decisions at multi-levels in European Manufacturing Companies- needed to support the competitiveness of European industrial companies, especially when looking to emerging and existing competitors from the BRIC countries

The current state-of-the-art use in manufacturing of simulation involves the use of a commercial simulation product (over 30 exist in the market) in either a standalone project, an application that is loosely coupled to an information system, or a data driven tool for a defined sector or problem domain, e.g. AutoSched for semi-conductor capacity planning.  As stated by  Gartner in the top 10 strategic technologies for 2011 technology forecast, and articulated in this research call, there is a need to evolve simulation  for “predictions in real-time to support each individual business action”.  The main technical barrier to achieving this is the lack of availability of a semantic free simulation development platform.  Using current simulation products to build simulation applications requires building translators to convert the semantic of the problem into the semantic model of the simulation product used.  This requires a large amount of costly skilled man-month effort and results in a loose coupling of simulation and the application decision process domain. Therefore the innovation foundations of the DREAM project is the development of a semantic free modular, open simulation optimization platform, with cognisance of the wider multifaceted barriers to adoption by large and small manufacturing enterprises of advanced decision support tools. 

These technical developments will be based on the requirements of real business needs of pilot cases representing “real world” issues of the industrial partners, thereby enabling a company-centric innovation process to ensure the applicability of project results. The pilot cases are characterised by a common set of requirements that is specialized into pilots from different industrial sectors. This, plus the availability of results to the wider community through the licensing approach adopted in the project will broaden the impact of the project substantially. The real world industrial use cases come from companies in the semiconductor & electronics, medical devices, automotive supplier, textile machinery and software development industries – Infineon, Boston Scientific, Leotech, Balkan and NEXEDI.