SIMULATION MODEL TO ANALYZE TRANSPORT, HANDLING, TEMPORARY STORAGE AND SORTING ISSUES: A VALUABLE WAY TO SUPPORT LAYOUT, SYSTEM DEFINITION AND CONFIGURATION AND SCHEDULING DECISION

摘要

The following paper describes the use of simulation models to analyze a common production scenario in manufacturing plants: many assembly lines producing specific families of items in a large variety of versions; following handling and transport system, evaluated to be effective, costless, with an adequate capacity to be not the bottleneck of the whole system, and integrated with a storage/sorting system to decoupling the assembly phase and the following ones as completion/test and expedition phase, included recovery and reform of the expedition lot. To analyze a system like this, a simulation model has been developed with a flexible AGVs transport system, a Transit Point Warehouse acted by AS/RS, used also as. sorting media. The size of the warehouse incoming bay, number of warehouse sub allocation zones or aisles, the capacity of all queues, all control logics for AGV's have been evaluated in a pre-modeling phase, and then evaluated by the model.