Simulation and production planning for manufacturing cells

Simulation is used to verify the feasibility of the design of manufacturing cells for a major automotive company. The cell design, which combines new and existing machines in a component manufacture, is presented, showing the difficulties that can result with such a system. Simply changing the layout (arranging machines into cells) could provide some benefits, but these benefits were offset by a high level of required investment. The reasons for the increased costs include poorly matched cycle times, machine downtimes, complex material handling and long changeovers. Improvements in machine and material handling designs were found to be necessary in order to increase cell performance and reduce investment to a feasible level