Title: The allocation of improvement programs in a flow shop for single and multi-products: a simulation assessment

Authors: Paolo Renna; Michele Ambrico

Addresses: School of Engineering, University of Basilicata, 85110, Potenza, Italy ' CRF/WCM R&I, Campus Manufacturing, Zona Industriale San Nicola di Melfi, 85025 Melfi (Pz), Italy

Abstract: The continuous improvement is crucial to increase the company's competitiveness in today's market. This paper proposes a multi-dimension simulation environment to test improvement programs in a flow shop context. The simulator developed tests the programs proposed in the literature: centralised, distributed and hybrid. The main original contributions of this research are: a simulation environment with higher details; the analysis of several performance measures as the throughput, lead time, work in process, average utilisation and the defected products for each workstation of the production line; the case of flow shop with multi-products. The experimental plan concerns the change of the following issues: set-up times, bottleneck position and process times. The flow shop without improvement programs is the benchmark of the performance measures. The simulation results show how the centralised policy is the better in a single product case, while the hybrid policy leads to the better results in case of multi-products.

Keywords: flow shop; allocation of improvement programs; performance measures; multi-products; discrete event simulation.

DOI: 10.1504/IJASM.2019.101365

International Journal of Agile Systems and Management, 2019 Vol.12 No.3, pp.228 - 244

Received: 14 Apr 2018
Accepted: 26 Nov 2018
Published online: 05 Aug 2019 *

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