Shop floor scheduling with simulation based proactive decision support

Abstract

This paper involves the study of a simulation based proactive decision support module for the shop-floor scheduling of the plastic processing section (PPS) at Bharti Telecom Limited, Gurgaon, India. The flow of material and information in this shop is highly complex as it involves multiple product parts, sequence dependent setup, molding machine specifications, mould restrictions etc. with a variety of scheduling and operational choices. The shop floor planning and scheduling decisions are being exercised manually and there is enough scope of using this simulation based tool to improve the shop-performance. In this work, efforts have been made to simulate the scheduling environment of this section. The performance of the shop depends on various parameters such as initial conditions of the machines, the load on the system, sequencing rule etc. Also the user requirements are so varied and situation dependent that it requires the use of simulation techniques to get a better schedule. Further, there are some findings based on the simulation experiments, which are in the process of implementation in the shop.