A Hybrid Simulation Model for an Efficient and Flexible Shop Floor System

Abstract

One of the goals of the future manufacturing systems is autonomic and self-organized shop floors. This requires flexible manufacturing units in terms of their availability and ability so that extremely personalized products, even of lot size equal to one, can be produced. In this paper, we propose a framework, which focuses on grouping cohesion of manufacturing units and efficient routing of products to resources. Towards this, we integrate an established cultural evolution model to achieve desirable flexibility of resources considering the requirements of the products that are being manufactured. A hybrid discrete simulation environment is implemented, in which cultural evolution among the resources is modeled using discrete-time, whereas, for routing, a simple queuing system is modeled using the discrete-event method.