Simulation-driven manufacturing planning for product-production variety coordination

Ambitious manufacturers are challenged to satisfy a broad range of customers while ensuring that the emerging product variety can be produced. Current practice suggests that products and production systems are modeled separately until the late stages of development when the designs are fixed and modifications are costly. In this paper, both product and production varieties are modeled, assessed, and evaluated using discrete-event simulation during preliminary stages. An illustrative example from the aerospace industry is used to demonstrate the approach. The simulation software Simio is used to model a sequence of operations and a set of input data related to a variety of aerospace sub-systems and a variety of welding resources. Through the simulations, the average utilization rate, the average throughput time, and the average work in process are generated. These outputs are used to evaluate the sets of product-production alternatives during the early stages of platform development when the cost to adjust the design of the products, production resources and operations are trifling.