BOTTLENECK MANAGEMENT WITH THROUGHPUT CURVES: A SIMULATION IN PRACTICE

摘要

The performance in many manufacturing companies is limited through bottlenecks in both production and assembly divisions. For this reason, bottlenecks are often the starting point of improvement initiatives. While there has been much work done on bottlenecks that appear in production systems in theory, practical evidence is still rare. In this work the accuracy and the applicability of the throughput by Kreutzfeldt (1995) is analyzed and the optimization algorithm implemented are reviewed. The presented work is completed as part of the research project "DePlaVis", located at the University of Applied Sciences in Hamburg. The starting point of its development is the throughput curve, which identifies and evaluates bottlenecks in the manufacturing environment. In order to verify the findings, an event-discrete simulation was programmed and analyzed. The simulation that is conducted partially supported the developed model. It produces similar results for the throughput and thus for the performance. The possible applications of the throughput curve lies principally in the planning and control of orders for manufacturing processes. Furthermore, it is also possible to derive information from the curve that can be used to improve performance and efficiency.