  The globalization of markets and world-wide competition forces manufacturing
enterprises to enter into alliances leading to the creation of distributed
manufacturing enterprises. Before forming a partnership it is essential to
evaluate viability of proposed enterprise as well as how a companys operations
are affected by the proposed virtual enterprise. Distributed simulation
provides an attractive tool to make decisions on such situations. However, due
to its complexity and high cost distributed simulation failed to gain a wide
acceptance from industrial users. This paper presents a new approach for
distributed manufacturing simulation (DMS) including a formal methodology for
DMS and, implementation approach using current commercial simulation software,
employing widely available and cost effective technologies. The main objective
of this work is to promote the use of distributed simulation particularly in
distributed manufacturing by making it fast to develop and less complicated for
implementation.
