2018 Volume 31 Issue 10 Pages 347-355
In the large scale material processing factory such as iron-and-steel works, aluminum plate rolling or copper stripping processes, the jobs of the same type of processing method are grouped to one operational lot from the viewpoint of productivity and quality based on the operating conditions specific to the facility and the priority which is given to the processing jobs in accordance with particular situations. To support production planning or considering operation rules and capital investment policy in such processes, we have already proposed a simulation model, which has hierarchical queue structure to express various lot making operations flexibly. In addition we newly implemented an estimation mechanism of the change in the number of jobs included in the lot to reduce unnecessary staying time of jobs caused by further lot size enlargement. In this paper the outline and features of the proposed model are described and the effectiveness of the model is confirmed by numerical experiments. Finally verification examples using actual production system data are introduced.
