A Survey on Automatic Model Generation for Material Flow Simulation in Discrete Manufacturing

Adaptivity of production systems is acknowledged as a key competition factor in the manufacturing industry. In order to decrease reaction time and increase cost efficiency, changes to a production system are often planned and validated using material flow simulation. However, repeated manual synchronization of the simulation model with the real manufacturing environment is time-consuming and error-prone. Automatic simulation model generation (ASMG) could overcome these issues. In contrast to recent surveys on ASMG, we focus on information retrieval. Accordingly, we constitute the state of the art of this problem domain and outline future research directions.