Paper summary
REAL TIME DISCRETE EVENT SIMULATION OF A PCB PRODUCTION SYSTEM FOR OPERATIONAL SUPPORT
This is a summary of the paper titled “Real Time Simulation of a PCB Production System for Operational Support” by Mats Jackson and Christer Johansson in the 1997 Winter Simulation Conference. I picked this paper because it deals with how Discrete Event Simulation (DES) is used to assist a crucial methodology in the current market – “Agile” manufacturing.
Nowadays, the customers want better products available at cheaper prices. The authors believe that for a production system to sustain in such a market, the key is to be “agile”. That is, to be able to deal with demand uncertainties and other variations inside the supply chain without sacrificing their goals and/or objectives. In order to achieve this, the system has to incorporate flexible production methods, flexible resources and manpower. The authors feel that in order to deal with the variations in demand and other factors in the production system, the decision-making power needs to be distributed into the various echelons of the system. In order for this to happen, the information available to these echelons should support the decentralized decision-making. The authors strive to explain how DES can be used to generate the necessary information which would assist the decision-making process and gives proper feedback thus providing the system with the necessary agility.
Since it is difficult to quantify the usefulness of DES in providing decision support, the authors have depicted a case study where simulation is used to simulate and forecast the Printed Circuit Board (PCB) manufacturing line at ABB Industrial Systems, Sweden. This case study deals with the application of simulation in the operation of the production line such as production planning, resource estimation and estimation of work load. If there was no forecast, the operators had to plan the capacity on the fly. So, they had to keep extra resources to tackle
This is a summary of the paper titled “Real Time Simulation of a PCB Production System for Operational Support” by Mats Jackson and Christer Johansson in the 1997 Winter Simulation Conference. I picked this paper because it deals with how Discrete Event Simulation (DES) is used to assist a crucial methodology in the current market – “Agile” manufacturing.
Nowadays, the customers want better products available at cheaper prices. The authors believe that for a production system to sustain in such a market, the key is to be “agile”. That is, to be able to deal with demand uncertainties and other variations inside the supply chain without sacrificing their goals and/or objectives. In order to achieve this, the system has to incorporate flexible production methods, flexible resources and manpower. The authors feel that in order to deal with the variations in demand and other factors in the production system, the decision-making power needs to be distributed into the various echelons of the system. In order for this to happen, the information available to these echelons should support the decentralized decision-making. The authors strive to explain how DES can be used to generate the necessary information which would assist the decision-making process and gives proper feedback thus providing the system with the necessary agility.
Since it is difficult to quantify the usefulness of DES in providing decision support, the authors have depicted a case study where simulation is used to simulate and forecast the Printed Circuit Board (PCB) manufacturing line at ABB Industrial Systems, Sweden. This case study deals with the application of simulation in the operation of the production line such as production planning, resource estimation and estimation of work load. If there was no forecast, the operators had to plan the capacity on the fly. So, they had to keep extra resources to tackle