Ship Design Optimization
This contribution is devoted to exploiting the analogy between a modernmanufacturingplant and a heterogeneous parallel computer to construct aHPCN decision support tool for ship designers. The application is a HPCN onebecause of the scale of shipbuilding - a large container vessel is constructed byassembling about 1。5 million atomic components in a production hierarchy. Therole of the decision support tool is to rapidly evaluate the manufacturingconsequences of design changes。 The implementation as a distributed multi-agentapplication running on top of PVM is described
1 Analogies between Manufacturing and HPCN
There are a number of analogies between the manufacture of complex productssuch as ships, aircraft and cars and the execution of a parallel program。 Themanufacture of a ship is carried out according to a production plan which ensures thatall the components come together at the right time at the right place. A parallelcomputer application should ensure that the appropriate data is available on theappropriate processor in a timely fashion.
It is not surprising, therefore, that manufacturing is plagued by indeterminacyexactly as are parallel programs executing on multi-processor hardware. This hascaused a number of researchers in production engineering to seek inspiration in otherareas where managing complexity and unpredictability is important。 A number of newparadigms, such as Holonic Manufacturing and Fractal Factories have emerged [1,2]which contain ideas rather reminiscent of those to be found in the field of Multi-Agent Systems [3, 4].
Manufacturing tasks are analogous to operations carried out on data, within thecontext of planning, scheduling and control. Also, complex products are assembled atphysically distributed workshops or production facilities, so the components must betransported between them。 This is analogous to communication of data betweenprocessors in a parallel computer, which thus also makes clear the analogy
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