Modeling Architecture for Hybrid System Dynamics and Discrete Event Simulation: Fid-Bau Portal

Modeling Architecture for Hybrid System Dynamics and Discrete Event Simulation

Alvanchi, A. / Lee, S. / AbouRizk, S. M.

Construction systems and projects comprise complex combinations of subsystems, processes, operations, and activities. Discrete Event Simulation (DES) has been used extensively for modeling construction systems, addressing system complexity, and analyzing system behavior. However, while DES is a powerful tool for capturing operations as they occur in reality, DES does have difficulty modeling context and its mutual effects on the operational components of a system. System Dynamics (SD), on the other hand, captures feedback loops that are derived from the context level of a system and that can anticipate system behavior; nevertheless, SD cannot effectively model the operational parts of a system. Hybrid SD and DES modeling provide a set of tools that use the capabilities, while improving upon the disadvantages, of these two approaches. Although initial efforts to develop hybrid SD-DES modeling dates back to the late 1990s, in the construction industry, there are relatively few studies in this area, and there is still no robust architecture for hybrid system developers. This paper addresses these issues by proposing a comprehensive hybrid simulation architecture based on the High Level Architecture (HLA) infrastructure, which can be used by hybrid simulation developers in the construction industry. A typical steel fabrication shop has been modeled based on the proposed architecture, and it has been compared with the ideally developed hybrid simulation architecture.