Simulation pulled by the need to reduce wastes and human effort in an intralogistics project

Abstract

Lean Thinking is a well-known management philosophy that increases productivity and reduces cost by eliminating waste. To achieve this, it uses all suitable available tools. Simulation has been widely used to design and/or diagnose production systems and to propose effective better alternatives. In addition, Ergonomics approaches have also been applied to improve work conditions. The project described in this article applied these knowledge areas to a real case, in order to propose the use of AGVs for the materials handling and transport in certain shop-floor zones, instead of using milkrun. The developed simulation model greatly contributed for this analysis and revealed the reduction of the supply machines time and route time by half as well the reduction the human effort.