Abstract
This article presents a procedure for designing footwear production plants with a Decision Support System combined with an expert system and a simulation approach. The footwear industry has many operations and is labour intensive. Optimisation of plant layout, machinery, and human resources is very important to design the footwear manufacturing system, making adequate investment in space and equipment. In the industry it is essential to reduce the process time, so the research is based on a Decision Support System combined with an expert system and simulation to improve the design of the manufacturing plan. This work contains two case studies, direct injection manufacturing and assembly and carburising methods, which are compared to analyse all the necessary resources to have the best cost–benefit ratio. In each case, a precise knowledge of the type and quantity of machinery and human resources is needed to estimate the production. This comparison has been done through simulations and using a knowledge base of an expert system. The conclusions are presented in which an improvement in production time is obtained by applying the methodology developed in the study.
Highlights
The design of a manufacturing plant is an important feature, more so at present in which automation is an upward trend
It is important to outline some of the results provided by the simulations once the model is finished and optimised with the rotary injection machine working at full capacity in every moment
The expert system proposed in this research consists of a set of rules, an object-oriented modelling, technical information of components, and procedural functions
Summary
The design of a manufacturing plant is an important feature, more so at present in which automation is an upward trend. The shoe industries are a low automatised industry compared with other sectors and the increase of automation in recent years could make the worker’s experience in designing the plant incomplete, due to the processes that become fully automated. For this main reason, the shoe industry presents high difference with other industries, a reconversion of the industry is being carried out to automatise it, but this process is gradual, applying known techniques to a non-exploited industrial sector with the aim of full automatisation
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