SIMULATION AIDED PRODUCTION PLANNING BY COUPLING A PPC SYSTEM AND A SIMULATION TOOL

摘要

This paper deals with the development of simulation models for the manufacturing industry and with the coupling of a ppc system and a simulation tool. The use of simulation allows an improvement of production planning and more appropriate decisions on scheduling customer orders. A strategy is presented which starts from network analysis as is used by today's Planning Systems, transforms a local planning network into a simulation model, uses that model for simulation experiments in order to find a global feasible plan. The study is exemplified by an application which was realized for a medium sized manufacturer of shower cubicles having a very large number of product variations.