A Decision Support System for Flexibility Enabled Discrete Part Manufacturing System

This paper discusses how simulation can be used as decision support system. Simulation technique is used to evaluate the performance of flexibility enabled manufacturing system. This manufacturing system produces discrete part at regular interval. The ultimate goal of this paper is to find out the way to reduce work-in-process inventory, maintain high production rate and also to find out time taken to produce a product. We expect that reducing inventory will lead to shorter make-span time, which will ultimately improve production rate. This work is also concerned with identifying bottleneck resources and eliminating bottleneck by applying routing flexibility in the system. Routing flexibility helps in redistribution of load and ultimately leading to the improvement in the performance of the system.