Combining simulation and scheduling: an application in the office furniture industry using ARENA and PREACTOR

This paper describes the combination of a proprietary finite capacity scheduling package, PREACTOR 200, with the ARENA simulation package to provide a day-to-day scheduling tool for the assembly of office furniture by a company in Austria. The keyword of this project is "Factory in a Factory," or FIF, which denotes how the assembly facility is broken down into sub-units that are responsible for assembling different types of furniture. Previously ARENA had been used to model the interactions that occur within each FIF (labor, buffer space, access to the conveyors) and ensure that product arrived at the right time to the delivery area at the end of a main conveyor so that containers (that are used to transport orders to different locations around Europe) could be filled in the correct sequence. It was clear from this preliminary work that sequencing of product assembly in each FIF and load leveling, whereby the number of operators in each FIF could be changed according to product mix, were key to the functioning of the facility.