Production plans are based on fair assumptions of process performance and all operation parameters are taken as averages. There are a number of events that happen in any manufacturing setup during the course of production like periodic delivery of raw materials or changeovers on a machine. The interaction between these events is non-linear and cannot be easily visualized. As a result of which most of the production plans in any company have only a limited realization. This paper provides an example of how simulation using AnyLogic has been applied in one such plant scenario to visualize the plan outcome.
The client is a leading manufacturer of gold and silver products in India. The plant receives raw material in the form of impure bars. This raw material then undergoes multiple processes such as melting, refining, graining and casting to be transformed into products. The production process is a mix of discrete and process manufacturing.
Multimethod simulation was chosen as an approach to model the processes and accurately predict the daily refining bank output and bullion output. Simulation also provided opportunity to see the behavior of the system with time (like machine capacity utilization), and tweak the parameters to get the best results.