Simulation And Scheduling Analysis Of An Automobile Glass Production System

In manufacturing system, the customers need a wider variety of products. Thus, much more types of products with a small lot are required to be processed in the production system. However, it gives rise to a series of problems which leads to a low productivity, output, and profit. Under such a situation, an increasing number of companies have used the lean production to manage and schedule the production system. Without interrupted practice, the lean production has played an important role in scheduling the production system of many companies. Thus, the concept of lean production has been gradually recognized by the countries around the world. Because of more and more complicated production system, the computer-based modeling and simulation becomes an effective way to schedule the manufacturing system.Computer simulation is a methodology to transfer the real production system to a computer simulation model. Then, the model can be use to analyze the system. Such a method plays an important role in finding the scheduling problem of the production system, and then it can help decision-makers to find a effective solution.This paper studies a production process of a cars’windshield factory. The production process includes pretreatment process, bending process, high pressure process, assembly process and packaging process. With much more types and a small lot of products being required by the customers, when the set up time of switching process is considered, it will cause a lot of the WIP between the pretreatment and bending process. This increases the cost of the factory. In order to solve this problem, based on the lean production theory, different methods are adopted together to analyze the production system. With the obtained results, scheduling algorithms are developed to obtain the optimal schedule for the production of the cars’windshield. Such algorithms are useful to reduce the inventory and cost and improve the productivity. Then, based the algorithms, a Flexsim-based simulation model is developed for the production system of the car’windshield. Note that this model is a parameterized one. Thus, with inputting the process parameters, the simulation model can analyze the system and give a solution to help to control and schedule the system. The proposed methods also can be expand to the factories which have the similar scheduling problems.