Home // International Journal On Advances in Systems and Measurements, volume 5, numbers 3 and 4, 2012 // View article

Increase of Robustness in Production Plans using a Hybrid Optimization and Simulation Approach

Authors:
Christoph Laroque
Robin Delius
Jan-Hendrik Fischer
Dennis Horstkaemper

Keywords: material flow simulation; robustness; production planning; mathematical optimization

Abstract:
We propose the use of the material flow simulation to evaluate the robustness of a production plan, which was created and optimized with no respect to unforeseen derivations. The necessary probabilities for machine failures and similar operational events on the floor can easily be integrated in the simulation model, in order to analyze, how initial plan performs in these situations. The influence of unforeseen events in daily production cannot be modeled within mathematical optimization without consuming either large amounts of computation time or requiring domain specific techniques, which increasingly decrease the maintainability of a model. We show a possible way to use simulation to evaluate and enhance a production plan. We illustrate the developed process using a real-world use-case of medium complexity and can show, that simulation is able to evaluate the robustness of a given pre-optimized production plan.

Pages: 100 to 112

Copyright: Copyright (c) to authors, 2012. Used with permission.

Publication date: December 31, 2012

Published in: journal

ISSN: 1942-261x