Automatic identification of constraints and improvement actions in production systems using multi-objective optimization and post-optimality analysis

Abstract

Manufacturing companies are operating in a severely competitive global market, which renders an urgent need for them to explore new methods to enhance the performance of their production systems in order to retain their competitiveness. Regarding the performance of a production system, it is not sufficient simply to detect which operations to improve, but it is imperative to pinpoint the right actions in the right order to avoid sub-optimizations and wastes in time and expense. Therefore, a more accurate and efficient method for supporting system improvement decisions is greatly needed in manufacturing systems management. Based on research in combining simulation-based multi-objective optimization and post-optimality analysis methods for production systems design and analysis, a novel method for the automatic identification of bottlenecks and improvement actions, so-called Simulation-based Constraint Identification (SCI), is proposed in this paper. The essence of the SCI method is the application of simulation-based multi-objective optimization with the conflicting objectives to maximize the throughput and minimize the number of required improvement actions simultaneously. By using post-optimality analysis to process the generated optimization dataset, the exact improvement actions needed to attain a certain level of performance of the production line are automatically put into a rank order. In other words, when compared to other existing approaches in bottleneck detection, the key novelty of combining multi-objective optimization and post-optimality analysis is to make SCI capable of accurately identifying a rank order for the required levels of improvement for a large number of system parameters which impede the performance of the entire system, in a single optimization run. At the same time, since SCI is basically built atop a simulation-based optimization approach, it is capable of handling large-scale, real-world system models with complicated process characteristics. Apart from introducing such a method, this paper provides some detailed validation results from applying SCI both in hypothetical examples that can easily be replicated as well as a complex, real-world industrial improvement project. The promising results compared to other existing bottleneck detection methods have demonstrated that SCI can provide valuable higher-level information to support confident decision-making in production systems improvement.