Abstract
The evolution in demand is leading industry market to seek for product orders in smaller lots and shorter deadlines. A need therefore arises to adapt industry production to these market changes. A portuguese plumbing and bath accessories company decided to study a new organization layout for its multi-site production plant. The objective was to evaluate different organization scenarios in order to rationalize the floor layout and reduce costs. This Paper presents a study to evaluate different scenarios for a multi-site production plant using the Arena simulation software tool. The simulation model uses VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) to dynamically generate the simulation model. The product data is read from Excel spreadsheets or text files. Autocad is used for defining the plant layout and generating the working center coordinates. The Autocad drawing is used as the simulation background allowing the display of a realistic scaled animation.

Abstract
Industrial companies are faced today with strong competition and fast changing markets. To reduce the risk and evaluate alternatives, simulation is considered to be a good tool. Industrial company's simulation must have sufficient detail to be useful but, at the same time, take into account the external environmental behaviour. Distributed simulation has specific characteristics to study these problems but its complexity limits its use in industry as stated in the literature. To overcome these difficulties, a framework is proposed, offering communication and synchronization mechanisms, which allow the integration of simulation models in the industrial area. To promote semantic interoperability, a business language is also proposed based on the OASIS Universal Business Language (UBL). As industrial companies have a high level of complexity and autonomy, the simulation models work as agents using Agent-based Modelling and Simulation (ABMS) techniques to achieve a more realistic behaviour of the whole system.