Distributed simulation for multi-university collaborative manufacturing

In today's competitive business environment, companies design, manufacture and distribute products through a global supply chain network in pursuit of lower cost, shorter time-to-market and better quality. This new trend has generated critical competency gaps between today's global manufacturing workforce needs and what is provided by the current engineering curriculum. To respond to this need, our long-term goal is to enhance the experiences of undergraduate students in the entire product realization process under a global supply chain environment to prepare them for the challenges they will face when leaving the university. The objective of this paper (short-term goal) is to present a modeling and simulation platform, which will support rapid fabrication of supply chains by defining the facility set, their capability and decision models, product structure and the natural environment. The platform will help students under a multi-university supply chain understand supply chain behavior with a realistic supply chain model.