Discrete-event simulation (DES) is widely used in industrial decision-making to evaluate system performance before implementing changes. In complex environments like helicopter assembly lines, DES provides accurate key performance indicators (KPIs) such as Work-in-Progress (WIP), investment, and the rate of respect of customer due dates (customer satisfaction). However, each simulation run typically takes several hours, and users must test multiple configurations to find an acceptable solution. This makes DES impractical for daily operations or real-time planning. We developed four surrogate models—Random Forest, XGBoost, Transformers, and CNN-MLP—that approximate simulation outputs in milliseconds. Despite their speed, these models lose accuracy when production conditions change. We propose an online active learning approach that updates surrogate models with selected new simulations to maintain accuracy over time.

Classical simulation methods become not flexible and performant enough in complex models, necessitating the use of a distributed simulation technique to split the load and heterogeneity into separate sub-components and manage the simulation time between them. In this type of simulation, interoperability and reusability issues arise and should be addressed. The IEEE High-Level Architecture (HLA) standard for distributed simulation emphasizes federates interoperability and reusability, as well as time management and advanced data distribution techniques. This paper presents the methodologies and techniques used to develop the HLA federates, as part of the Simulation Exploration Experience (SEE) project, to virtually recreate a mission on the moon. This project is organized by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the Simulation Interoperability Standards Organization (SISO). For each SEE component, an HLA interface was developed to make it compliant with other SEE federates and reusable during the simulation run. Based on HLA mechanisms, heterogeneous components with an HLA interface were able to interexchange objects/attributes and interactions/parameters.

In order to monitor and assess the spread of the Omicron variant of COVID-19, we propose a Distributed Digital Twin that virtually mirrors a hemodialysis unit in a hospital in Toronto, Canada. Since the solution involves heterogeneous components, we rely on the IEEE HLA distributed simulation standard. Based on the standard, we use an agent-based/discrete event simulator together with a virtual reality environment in order to provide to the medical staff an immersive experience that incorporates a platform showing predictive analytics during a simulation run. This can help professionals monitor the number of exposed, symptomatic, asymptomatic, recovered, and deceased agents. Agents are modeled using a redesigned version of the susceptible-exposed-infected-recovered (SEIR) model. A contact matrix is generated to help identify those agents that increase the risk of the virus transmission within the unit.

Different heterogeneous simulation components can be integrated to produce a more effective complex global system. The IEEE High-Level Architecture (HLA) is an international standard that promotes interoperability and reusability for distributed simulation (DS). This paper proposes a DS system that integrates an agent-based and discrete-event simulator with a 3D game engine to build virtual reality (VR) applications that replicate real environments. In this case study, AnyLogic is used as an agent-based and discrete event simulator to simulate the process flow and COVID-19 transmission inside the University Health Network dialysis unit, Toronto, Canada. Unity game engine delivers the 3D modelling replicating the real architecture and environment of the dialysis unit. The HLA standard plays a major role in the integration of AnyLogic and Unity to produce a more effective and powerful DS system for VR applications.

The 9th edition of the CoMetS track aims to bring together leading researchers and practitioners from both the modeling and simulation (M&S) community and the collaborative environments community, in order to focus on innovative research contributions that address both the use of collaborative technologies in the field of M&S and the use of M&S methodologies and tools to address the design of collaborative systems. This paper reports on the motivations of the track and the organization of its ninth edition.

Manufacturing enterprises integrate products and services, to improve and expand business processes from the perspective of service, so that they can realize the management of the whole life cycle of the product and obtain more benefits. The original process mining algorithm cannot support the establishment of customer-centered service process model, nor can it describe the value creation mechanism of service stakeholders in the service process. To solve this problem, this paper takes the manufacturing product service system as the background, improves the flexible heuristic miner, which can mine customer-oriented service process model from the event log, and extracts the actors and value information of service activities, so as to build the service-oriented process value model. We verify the improved heuristic miner through a case of air conditioner product service system.

The 7th edition of the CoMetS track aims to bring together leading researchers and practitioners from both the modeling and simulation (M&S) community and the collaborative environments community, in order to focus on innovative research contributions that address both the use of collaborative technologies in the field of M&S and the use of M&S methodologies and tools to address the design of collaborative systems. This paper reports on the motivations of the track and the organization of its seventh edition.

In many domains, Discrete-Event Simulations (DES) are usually used to reproduce the behavior of a certain system or process, where events are processed one after another in chronological and sequential order. Classical DES will no longer be a possible solution for Complex and Large-scale systems, System of Systems (SoS), and Performance Evaluation Systems that compare multiple different simulations running simultaneously in parallel. Advances in network and communications made the Distributed Simulation (DS) approach one of the best solutions for the aforementioned Systems Simulations. One of the challenges faced when developing a DS from DES components is the federation behavior including time management and synchronization between these components. In most of the traditional DES platforms, simulations cannot exchange messages, nor change the configuration at run time. This makes the DES connection and integration very hard and at times, impossible to implement. This article presents the method used to integrate different DES components, using High-Level Architecture (HLA) Evolved Standard, Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN), and Jaamsim, a Java open source DES.

The CoMetS track aims to bring together leading researchers and practitioners from both the modeling and simulation (M&S) community and the collaborative environments community, in order to focus on innovative research contributions that address both the use of collaborative technologies in the field of M&S and the use of M&S methodologies and tools to address the design of collaborative systems. This paper reports on the motivations of the track and the organization of its sixth edition.

The process-oriented approach aims to put the customer at the heart of the company. This helps to emphasize how to improve processes to offer an attractive quality/price ratio that meets the expectations of the customer while maximizing profit. Business process management (BPM) fosters the benefits of process oriented-approach by ensuring the alignment between business requirements and the information technology. Modeling and Simulation (M&S) are the fundamentals of BPM. It increases the understandability of the process and facilitate its analysis for improvement. Moreover, the purpose of M&S is to bridge the gap between process requirements and process execution. Although their effective use is still limited in business area. To overcome this limitation an automated simulation approach extending BPMN with non-functional requirements at design time was provided. This paper presents a functional overview of our future enhancement to this approach that intends to enumerate process paths and prepare the involvement of human in the loop during simulation time.

The CoMetS track aims to bring together leading researchers and practitioners from both the modeling and simulation (M&S) community and the collaborative environments community, in order to focus on innovative research contributions that address both the use of collaborative technologies in the field of M&S and the use of M&S methodologies and tools to address the design of collaborative systems. This paper reports on the motivations of the track and the organization of its fifth edition.

Considered as an alternative to ERP and a pre-condition to the future Enterprise 4.0 based on IoT and Cyber physical system principle, this paper tentatively presents a proposal to develop an Enterprise Operating System (EOS). At first a set of requirements and functionalities are identified. Then a survey on existing relevant works is presented and mapped to the requirements. The architecture of envisioned EOS is outlined and followed by a simplified case example in the service sector. The last part draws some conclusions and gives future perspectives.

Social simulation implies two preconditions: determining a population and simulate the information diffusion within it. A population represents a group of interconnected individuals sharing information. In this paper, the population we generate is detailed by socio-cultural features, specifically the way that people tend to link together. To this end, the use of a social network is a little bit restrictive: people are linked by only one relationship. Multidimensional Social Networks (MSN) model 3D social networks where each dimension represent a kind of relationship [1]. The MSN architecture allows us to better represent the diversity of humans relations but also define distinctive rules for the simulation of the message diffusion. The inner idea is that information disseminates differently according to the links through which the information propagates. So, we present in this paper the modeling of our MSN based on social science and a simulation using propagation rules for each dimension.

Based on systems engineering principles, information modelling is seen as a central activity for the development and life cycle support of a product or system. It enables to reduce the costs derived from miscommunications and misconceptions normally occurring throughout the service system design, analysis and maintenance activities. Supporting the servitization of manufacturing and the evolution towards product-service systems or extended products, modelling and interoperability is becoming of utmost importance to ensure coherence among conceptual design phases at organizational levels down to technology development. Therefore, this paper explores the model-driven development and model-driven interoperability transformations principles to unify every step of the development of service systems, from its start at the application's business requirements, through the design of technology independent functions, to deployable services.

International audience

Ontology alignment is a critical issue for semantic integration and data interoperability. Many basic matching techniques have been proposed, the crucial point is how to combine different techniques to adapt the diverse sources of ontology. In this paper, we proposed to use three matchers with multiple strategies from perspective of label, semantic and structural aspects of ontology. A rule-based pre-process for identifying the core word with part-of-speech (POS) tagging is carried out before matching. Method Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) is applied to aggregate different matching results dynamically and automatically. The intensity of importance is determined by three similarity indicators, which reflect the essential features of source ontologies. This proposed approach shows strong matching ability, which obtained high precision and outstanding evaluation results in benchmarking experiment.

In this paper, we present an improvement to evaluate the HLA lookahead for distributed DEVS/G-DEVS models in a HLA-compliant environment. The models considered in this distributed simulation have state lifetimes functions of several state variables. We use the graph theory Dijkstra search to compute the different values of the state variables and a mathematical function analysis to determine the lookahead for the model states. We illustrate on an example how this solution extends the range of DEVS/G-DEVS models that can be involved into distributed simulations.