A cost-effective simulation procedure for achieving target throughput of new production lines

When a new facility such as automobile assembly line is designed, computer simulation is often used to estimate its actual throughput level. If it falls short of the target throughput level, then the design must be modified to increase the throughput capacity. For complex facilities having parallel processes and network of material flows, the modification procedure is not trivial. Even if the capacity of a particular bottleneck process is increased, the target throughput may not be achieved because the bottleneck may move to another process. Furthermore, each process has a different set of options with different cost to increase the capacity. In this study, we present a systematic procedure of determining the cost-effective set of options which achieves the target throughput.