Mechanical production line simulation modeling and experimental data analysis

A simulation system as a desktop resource named NEU-Simulation is developed by using the object-oriented simulation package eM-Plant^reg. in this paper. The simulated manufacturing system is a medium-sized equipment manufacturer which produces NC machine products. The simulation system adopts object-oriented modeling methods based on UML to simulate equipment manufacturing system. The NEU-Simulation is used by various manufacturing personnel as a tool to support decision-making. The simulation model developed is only partially successful. The emphasis in this paper is placed on the design of the machining production line. And four types of factors such as the number of equipment, machine tool operations time, buffer size and the number of employees etc. are considered and analyzed by using design of experiment (DOE) method to locate the bottlenecks of production line. Reduction of the number of simulation experiments can be realized by the Orthogonal experimental design method. The result of simulation analysis is used to guide the design and reconstruction of production line.