A brief introduction to deploy Amazon Web Services for online discrete-event simulation

The concept of digital twin demands fast and efficient methods to distribute, initialize, and execute simulation models that replicate real-world systems and processes. In the field of production and logistics, discrete-event simulation (DES) is the method of choice when it comes to developing digital twins. Cloud platforms such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) give the opportunity to distribute and parallelize the computationally expensive execution of simulation models on high-performance systems. However, there is presently no guidance on the real-time deployment of DES models on cloud infrastructures, making the topic difficult to approach. Against this background, we present an intuitive and practice-oriented procedure model for deploying DES models on AWS. We support our explanations with a demonstration of our procedure model using an end-to-end example of a simple order manufacturing process.