Production Planning and Setup Time Optimization: An Industrial Case Study

摘要

Production activity control approaches, methods, and mechanisms have been widely applied over the last decades, and continue to be of utmost importance nowadays, within the context of the currently fast-growing Industry 4.0 era. In this paper, a Simio-based simulation model is proposed and its application in a printing factory is illustrated. The main aim of this work consists of providing general production planning improvements in the considered factory, with a special focus on the reduction of setup time. The proposed model is based on several distinct production activity control mechanisms, for instance, the CONWIP and the Routing Group mechanisms from Simio, which did enable to reach good improvements regarding a set of performance measures considered, including machines' setup time reduction, along with the maximization of the percentage of products delivered on time. Future work is also planned to be carried out to improve other kinds of performance measures, and by using other types of production activity control mechanisms, to be further applied in other industrial companies and sectors.