AGENT-BASED DISCRETE EVENT SIMULATION – SYSTEM DYNAMICS APPROACH TO OPTIMIZE MANUFACTURING SYSTEM WITH MAINTENANCE ACTIVITIES

Abstract

Traditional manufacturing processes are commonly executed without considering the requirements of other factors especially related to maintenance activities. Therefore, the processes are often interrupted due to machines breakdown and require reactive maintenance. This contributes to an unorganized scenario where the interruption will cause delay and affect the production schedule. The objective of this paper is to optimize the shop floor operation by integrating process planning with two maintenance approaches – preventive and reactive maintenances. Three crucial factors were considered: makespan. A hybrid Discrete Event Simulation (DES) – System Dynamics (SD) approach is proposed for this purpose, based on multi-agent modelling for jobs and operating machines. This method allowed the implementation of an agent's hybrid behaviour, which takes into account both the agent's own return and the agent's own return. The authors look at systematic analysis approaches that incorporate a simulation-based analytic and system dynamics modeling to map system behavior and consequently use the information to optimize the system. Four dispatching rules are used to shows the performance variations. The result shows that the proposed approach, combined with appropriate dispatching rule is capable to yield competitive performances including 17% increment of throughput and 14% reduction of tardiness. The study proves that the proposed DES-SD approach is capable to optimize the performance of the system.