Design Policies in Virtual Cellular Manufacturing Systems by Multi-Domain Simulation Environment

Abstract

In today’s competitive market, customer demand is characterized by high fluctuations and it is more difficult to forecast. Therefore, the classical cellular manufacturing systems need to be revised in order to stay competitive. Among the different approaches to support the cellular manufacturing systems, the concept of virtual cellular manufacturing systems can improve the performance in turbulent environment. This paper proposes two policies to support the problem of the reconfiguration of machines in a virtual cellular manufacturing system. The policies proposed are tested developing a multi-domain simulation environment in ExtendSim®. The experiments conducted show how the proposed approach improves the performance of the manufacturing systems especially when some disturbances occur as demand fluctuations, machine failures and processing time are uncertain.