Developing a Parallel Simulation Model for Improving Manufacturing Systems Performance

Orders at manufacturing shop-floors are processed based on a number of loading rules. One of the base rules is the first come, first served. This rule will not allow orders to be processed by any of the processing stations until the previous order leaves the shared process i.e. if resources are shared then the order will wait until the resource switches to idle state. The manufacturing shop floor is responsible of manufacturing raw material and transforming them into final products that will meet the customer requirements including a delivery deadline to the customer. Late delivery of orders because of low productivity, high production times and pessimal resources allocation at shop floors will lead to lower levels of customers’ satisfaction. Hence, more advanced ways to process orders are required to improve shop floors performance. The main aim of the project is to design and develop a capacity simulator model based on spreadsheet tools. This model will enable parallel processing of orders when simulating shop floors and it is based on discrete event simulation methodology. The key objective is to model the logic of shop floor operations and the logic parallel simulation; mimicking real life shop floor operations which will help towards creating the capacity calculator simulator. Flowchart will be used to model logical operations on shop floors as well as the logic of the parallel simulation algorithm. In addition, UML diagrams representing entities, data and attributes in the shop floor will be used. The developed simulation is established via spreadsheet tools with scripted VBA Macro codes. Verification and validation techniques have been applied through results analysis of tested case study scenarios, which will provide the justification of the developed model. The expected outputs will show a reduction in the total production, queue times and increment in resource utilisations of the shop floor being investigated. The status of whether or not orders have been produced on time will be displayed.