Proceedings of the 2020 Winter Simulation Conference
K.-H. Bae, B. Feng, S. Kim, S. Lazarova-Molnar, Z. Zheng, T. Roeder, and R. Thiesing, eds.
SCALABLE, RECONFIGURABLE SIMULATION MODELS IN INDUSTRY4.0-ORIENTED
ENTERPRISE MODELING
Mahdi El Alaoui El Abdellaoui
Emmanuel Bricard
elm.leblanc – Innovation Center of Operations
Bosch Group, Thermotechnology Division
Drancy, 93700, FRANCE
Fr´ ed´ eric Grimaud
Paolo Gianessi
Xavier Delorme
Mines Saint-
´
Etienne, Univ. Clermont Auvergne
CNRS, UMR 6158 LIMOS, Institut Henri Fayol
F-42023, Saint-
´
Etienne, FRANCE
ABSTRACT
The increasingly unpredictable demand is among the major challenges of Industry 4.0, asking manufacturing
systems (MS) for a capacity of adaptation that accelerates the decision processes. Decision Support Systems
(DSS), and among them Simulation-based DSS, must therefore result from new Enterprise Modeling (EM)
frameworks, capable of taking advantage of advances in data integration and processing possibilities. After
briefly introducing such a new EM framework, MEMO I4.0, this article shows how to use it to derive
scalable, flexible simulation models, so as to improve and monitor the MS processes and finally address
this challenge. An example to generate a simulation model for a real case study is presented.
1 INTRODUCTION
In the new era of Industry 4.0, market complexity is increasing more and more, and due to new customer
requirements for product customization and the globalization concept, customer demand becomes more
difficult to predict leading to the development of new business models (Pereira and Romero 2017). Therefore,
companies should have flexible and reconfigurable Manufacturing Systems (MS), as the product life cycle
is shorter, competitiveness has increased and involves new investments and business strategies. Thus,
the production methods are completely impacted, and the same goes for the Enterprise Modeling (EM)
methodologies. In the Last three decades, EM frameworks have been used to describe the MS from the
conceptual analysis of an industrial activity to the implementation of a Decision Support Systems (DSS).
The decision support at different levels according to the time horizon allows to monitor key performance and
react to unpredictable events (Roboam et al. 1989). More and more often, EMs integrate simulation-based
DSS (Barjis 2011). The evolution of industrial paradigms imposes the evolution of DSS, which should
not only include the uncertain aspect, but also be redesigned and implemented in parallel to the MS, if
not in advance (Felsberger et al. 2016). However, the more recent EMs, inspite of integrating at the
conceptual level the specific concepts of Industry 4.0, are not yet able to carry out the modeling up to the
implementation of an agile, quickly reconfigurable simulation-based DSS.
In this article, we propose a new EM framework, MEMO I4.0, which has this conceptual-to-
implementation feature, and focus on its ability to generate a MS simulation model and to quickly scale it
up, or reconfigure it, whenever a new configuration of the MS is at study. After reviewing the literature
of the most known EM frameworks and their limits in Section 2, Section 3 briefly introduces MEMO I4.0
that is used in Section 4 to implement a reconfigurable MS simulation model. In Section 5, a case study
inspired from a real case of elm.leblanc company is presented. Finally, Section 6 concludes this work.
2755 978-1-7281-9499-8/20/$31.00 ©2020 IEEE