SHOP FLOOR CONTROL MODEL CAPABLE OF HANDLING BREAKDOWNS THROUGH ROUTING FLEXIBILITY

Abstract

Shop floor control system (SFCS) performs the production activities required to fulfill orders received from the business system. The increased use of flexible manufacturing systems to efficiently provide customers with diversified products has created a significant set of operational challenges for managers. Many issues concerning procedures and policies for the day-to-day operation of these systems are still unresolved. Hence, the present manufacturing environment demands a high degree of flexibility and minimum lead-time from product order to delivery. Handling of breakdowns through routing flexibility in shop floor resources can play an important role in this work. This work presents a shop floor control model, which addresses the issues of rapid and efficient response to changes associated with dynamic scheduling, real time process planning and other factors that are integral to a modem manufacturing system. A simulated model of shop floor control system has been developed using ProModel software to study the effect of breakdown in machines so as to maximize the utilization of shop floor resources and minimize the makespan time through routing flexibility. When breakdown occurs, a shop floor control system reacts immediately to enable a good combination of performance optimization and reaction to breakdown. It presents a shop floor control model in a highly varying production demand environment. The dynamically changing demand can be characterized in terms of attributes such as inter arrival times, number of part types and arrival pattern of part types. The basic steps in simulation study are formulating the problem, building the simulation model, running the model and analyzing the output. The analysis and evaluation of two shop floor control models having different layout with unidirectional and bidirectional paths is performed by considering machine breakdowns and routing