Modeling, Analysis & Simulation of Tubes Manufacturing Process and Industrial Operations Controls

In a generic manufacturing system the market orders concerning products or items are translated into Shop Orders (often referred also as Jobs, parts, Orders and so on). Each Shop Order (here in after S.O.), following a precise job routing, is subjected to a particular sequences of operations in order to be completed. The operations are in general executed by means of machines, workstations, etc. When a market demand becomes S.O. it means that, in a short period of time, it will be manufactured the relative product in order to satisfy customer requirements. For each S.O. the problem is the determination of the start time and completion time in correspondence of each machine or workstation. In other words, in a certain period of time (days, week etc.) it is required to schedule the available S.O.s on the available machines avoiding unfeasible scheduling and optimizing some functions to improve system performances. The paper presents a Modeling & Simulation based approach for facing the scheduling problem in a real manufacturing system. An advanced way to use classic discrete event simulation package is also presented together with the accreditation of the proposed model.