A simulation tool for complex assembly lines with multi-skilled resources

The focus areas of our research are simulation and optimization of complex assembly lines for heavy machinery (airplanes, turbines, industrial machines etc.). These production facilities have several specific characteristics: many isolated project networks with precedence constraints and thousands of multi-mode activities, time-bounds for activities and projects, many priority rules, limited numbers of multi-skilled resources with individual shift regimes, internal and subcontracted personnel, and resource locking rules. Formally, it is defined as a Multi-Mode Resource-Constrained Multi-Project Scheduling Problem with activity splitting. A promising way of dealing with problems in this domain is simulation-based optimization. In this paper, we introduce a specific custom-built simulator designed for this problem domain. The tool supports a variety of real-world extensions and dedicated behavior which usually comes at enormous runtime and development cost when it has to be built into a commercial off-the-shelf simulation tool.