Production simulation education using rapid modeling and optimization: Successful studies

A common issue facing many simulation educators is that students usually spend excessive time to struggle with the programming and statistic parts of the simulation courses, and simply very little time to learn running systems analysis. If the students are coming from industry, and not the campus, then the problem becomes even worse. We observed this problem around 2005 and started to develop a new simulation software, a factory conceptual design toolset, partly aimed to address this problem. A new set of educational courses has since then been developed around the software for teaching production systems analysis, with both the campus students and managers/engineers from industry in mind. In this paper, we briefly introduce the software and share our experiences and some representative, successful studies conducted by the students in the past years.