FLEXSIM: A flexible manufacturing system simulator

The authors present a general portable simulation tool called FLEXSIM which is designed to evaluate certain classes of flexible manufacturing systems. The originality of the present tool is that it achieves the independence between the data model which represents the whole FMS and the simulation model itself by using a relational database management system to define the system being simulated. Thus, the tool has a user interface which is composed of a database management system geared specifically to handle the FMS simulator. This approach has two major advantages: the database interface can be coupled directly to the manufacturing database of a real FMS system, and the user of the tool can address it directly using the terminology and the data representation related to the real FMS being simulated. Furthermore, the use of a relational database system provides automatic verification of the consistency and completeness of the system model which is being simulated. FLEXSIM runs under the Unix Sys V and Unix Bsd4.3 operating systems; it is therefore a portable tool.