KEYWORDS SIMULATION VALIDATES DESIGN AND SCHEDULING OF A PRODUCTION LINE

Manufacturing, process design, discrete-event process simulation, scheduling Discrete-event process simulation has historically enjoyed its earliest, most numerous, and many of its most conspicuous successes when applied to the design and/or the scheduling of production processes. In this paper, we describe an application of simulation to the design, layout, and scheduling policies of a production line in the automotive industry. Specifically, the production line in question was and is vital to the operations and profitability of a first-tier international automotive supplier. In addition to describing the process itself, the simulation model, and its results, we discuss some complex challenges of input data collection and interpretation