Study Of Simulation-based Design For The Layout Of Flexible Automated Hull Manufacturing Workshop

Recent years, Flexible Manufacturing Technology and other advanced manufacturing technologies are of great interest to shipyards. These technologies have lots of advantages in improving productivity effect, flexibility and reducing production cost, which will bring shipyards tremendous economic benefits. In practice, it may take several years to set up a new automated workshop, incur tremendous cost, and involve high risk. During the construction of a new workshop, more advanced and cheaper hardware and software would be expected. In addition, the shipbuilding market may also be changed as well. The building workshop may lose competitiveness. Therefore, before a new automated workshop is set up, it is essential to design a virtual workshop and simulate the process in advance.In this paper, a simulation-based method is used to study the layout of flexible manufacturing workshop. The simulation of the flexible manufacturing workshop is a kind of discrete event system simulation. A lot of fieldworks have been done to collect the runtime data of the workshop in several famous shipyards. A survey is carried out among the workers and engineers to get the important information during practical production, such as production process, resource distribution, facility layout, etc. A simulate software named SSHM (Simulation for Ship Hull Manufacturing) is developed for the design of the automated ship hull manufacturing workshop by using object-oriented methodology. Analysis and Evaluation of productivity for the design project is also carried out.GA (generic algorithm) applied in machine layout design is also discussed in this paper. A GA-based program is developed to optimize the design of workshop layout. And then, the program is applied to a rebuild project of a ship hull fabrication workshop with practical data. Simulation results show that the layout calculated is optimum one, whose performance is satisfied.