Decision-Making Problems for Shop Floor Simulation in Discrete Part Manufacturing

Shop floor control systems (SFCS) are used to make real-time planning and scheduling decisions to optimize the efficiency of manufacturing shops. These shops exhibit a non-linear, dynamic evolution caused by 1) the concurrent flows of disparate parts following complex routings, 2) a variety of machines that breakdown at random times, 3) stochastic arrivals of new parts with different priorities, and 4) jobs that have probabilistic processing times and transportation times. Because of their ability to capture that evolution faithfully, simulation models are often used in the aforementioned decisions. In this paper, various types of decision-making problems encountered in a shop floor have been investigated and categorized into process related problems and resource related problems for shop floor simulation.