A neutral data interface specification for simulating machine shop operations

In most cases, the effort required to develop a meaningful simulation for a small machine shop exceeds the resources available. Machine shops typically do not have staff with appropriate technical qualifications required to develop custom simulations of their operations. Furthermore, simulators are not designed to use traditional shop data in its native format, so models and data import routines usually must be developed from scratch. If simulation software vendors were to try to develop generic job simulation models, they would still be faced with the problem that there are no standard formats for much of the data required to run the models. Thus, if someone wanted to input a specific shop's data into one of these hypothetical simulators, custom data translators would still need to be developed at possibly considerable expense. This paper provides an overview of work currently underway at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to develop neutral, standard, data interfaces for machine shop simulation that are being developed to support the simulation industry and manufacturing users.