Control and planning
Design of a model for the simulation and analysis of a production line of electric motors
I Ferrer Royal, R. De Castro Vila, M. Casadesús Fa (3)
AV. Lluís Santaló, s/n 17071 GIRONATel: 972 41 84 79
E-mail: ines.iferrer@udg.es
01/12/2002 1. Introduction
Companies often have to deal with the increase in demand through the study and the reorganization of the resources available. A company dedicated to the manufacture of electric motors is facing this situation. The process involves parameters of production complexes and variants (unproductive time, flexibility of operators...) therefore with operational techniques, it is complex to analyze production, to know the limits of capacity and detect the weaknesses of the factory.
To solve the problem it has resorted to the technique of the simulation. It has been designed and built a model that loyalty the current state of the factory and that allows you to vary the input and check the operation of the factory with these variations.
2 Experimental
After collecting the parameters and existing productive resources has been the design of the model through software Taylor for Windows. The model is divided into: material resources and production parameters. Material resources include: the machines (represent workplaces), the aids (account operators) and the products (45 types of engines). Production parameters vary for each machine on the basis of the product which is making. These are times of operation and the unproductive times. Unproductive times may be due to the change of product, to peacekeeping operations or incidents.
3. Results and discussion
There has been several simulations of the line to detect weaknesses and possible improvements that can be done. It has been identified that the current bottle neck are the winding machines. To improve the capacity of these reflected as other critical points are. Implementing improvements to each of them and conducting simulations relevant gets stabilize the line and increase production by 15%. Perhaps at first glance it seems a relatively low figure, but if one takes into account that will work 24 hours a day this is a very important improvement for the company.
To improve the capacity of the work centres will have decreased unproductive time (by applying techniques SMEDD and others) and it has increased the operating time (increased the flexibility of operators)
4 Conclusions
The simulation models of systems or real processes, analyze, optimize and redistributing existing resources, also perform experiments on processes; which can be crucial to make strategic decisions in the companies. This makes companies more competitive and have more agility to cope with the changes.