Simulation Based Shop Floor Control by Young-Jun Son a,* , Sanjay B. Joshi b , Richard A. Wysk b , and Jeffrey S. Smith c a Department of Systems and Industrial Engineering, The University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ 85721-0020, U.S.A. b Department of Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA 16802, U.S.A. c Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, Auburn University, AL 36849-5346, U.S.A. * Correspondence author Phone: 1-520-626-9530, Fax: 1-520-621-6555, E-mail: son@sie.arizona.edu Abstract This paper presents an overview of simulation-based shop floor control. Much of the work described herein is based on research conducted in the Computer Integrated Manufacturing (CIM) Lab at The Pennsylvania State University, the Texas A&M Computer Aided Manufacturing Lab (TAMCAM), Technion in Israel, and the University of Arizona CIM lab over the past decade. In this approach, a discrete event simulation is used not only as a traditional analysis and evaluation tool, but also as a task generator that drives shop floor operations in real- time. To enable this, a special feature of the Arena simulation language was used whereby the simulation model interacts directly with a shop floor execution system by sending and receiving messages. This control simulation reads process plans and master production orders from external databases that are updated by a process planning system and coordinated via an external business system. The control simulation also interacts with other external programs such as a planner, a scheduler, and an error detection and recovery function. In this paper, the architecture, implementation, and the integration of all the components of the proposed simulation-based control system are described in detail. Finally, extensions to this approach, including automatic model generation, are described. Keywords: Shop Floor Control, CIM, Real-time Scheduling, and Simulation 1