The analysis of material flow in the plate warehouse by simulation

POSCO has a plan for facility expansion in plate mill by building No.3 Plate Mill. By No.3 Plate Mill's coming on line, POSCO' current plate production of 2.3 million tons will increase by over 1 million tons to 3.36 million tons (Currently, annual domestic demand for plates is 4.42 million tons). With the plan of facility expansion, POSCO also has the plan of integrating the Plate Warehouse. But, we came to have a question whether the roller table from the mill to the warehouse could carry extended products. Engineers working in the mill wanted to install transfer facility to reduce the load of the roller table, but the engineers in facility purchasing team didn't want to buy the new facility. So, We needed to analyzed the material flow by simulation. The simulation was done on the VAX system by SLAM II. And this project was done by two engineers for 2 months. In the end, we concluded that two transfer facilities are needed for material flow with no bottle neck point.