Detailed simulation of real world job-shop with subassembly requirements

A highly-detailed model of a furniture manufacturing plant was constructed to evaluate the effects of various proposed changes and as a long term planning tool. As it turns out, this plant and model have many features of the general class of low-technology job shops with extensive subassembly: poor scheduling, bottlenecks, which are expensive to cure, and an inadequate knowledge of automation. Salient features of this study are the large size and complexity of the model and the diversity it contains. The plant seems to be typical of a low-technology job shop, and the model has the attribute of being about as realistic as can be expected of a simulation. This paper presents the results of validating (matching) the plant and the simulation. Extensive studies which quantify the scheduling priorities are then presented, and some new measures of performance are suggested and evaluated. Further studies on bottleneck removal and adding automation clearly indicate the costs and benefits to the plant. All of these studies would seem to be quite typical of such plants.