Design Space Exploration for Wireless-Integrated Factory Automation Systems

Recent years have brought significantly increased interest in integrating wireless communication capability within factory automation systems. Such integration motivates the study of interactions among the physical layout of factory workcells, wireless communication among workcells, and improving the overall factory system performance. In this paper, we develop methods for modeling and simulating these interactions, and implement these methods into the experimental study of complex design spaces for factory automation systems. The proposed methodology for modeling, simulation, and design space exploration can be used to gain insight into approaches for improving the configuration (e.g., physical layout or wireless protocol settings) of existing factory systems, and for understanding trade-offs in the design of new systems.