The Role Of Object Oriented Cad In A Generic Simulator For The Industrialized Housing Industry

This paper describes a simulator-based decision support tool for manufacturers of prefabricated homebuilding components. The Generic Industrialized Housing Manufacturing Simulator (GIHMS) serves as an experimental factory, capable of simulating factory performance under various product design, factory design, and operations management scenarios. GIHMS\u27 strength lies in its user-friendly, icon-based, point-and-click user interface. The interface allows the user to configure a factory and specify home designs for production without simulation language programming. The heart of the user interface is a specialized object oriented CAD system. This paper describes the GIHMS structure, focusing on the specialized CAD system, and demonstrates its functionality by describing the development of a structural foam panel factory model. © 1995