Modelling and Simulation in the Early Stages of the Development Process of a Manufacturing System - A case study of the development process of a wood flooring industry

Sammanfattning: Manufacturing Simulation, or more accurately, Discrete Event Simulation (DES), is an important problem-solving methodology for the solution of many real-world problems in the manufacturing industry. Implementation of DES has become successful in a number of industrial sectors. However, the wood manufacturing industries constitute an industrial sector where DES has still not made a breakthrough. At the same time there is a strong need for development within the sector of the wood manufacturing industries, working with the refinement of, for example, sawn boards into components and consumer products. It can be questioned, why DES cannot be used in these industries? The objective of this work has been to investigate conditions in the development process of new wood manufacturing systems. This covers the period from when the new system mainly exists as an idea or concept, up to the point when its specifications are finalised. If DES can be integrated in these early development stages, it also highlights an unusual application area of DES, where it is used in the design process. The simulation project showed that the specifications developed by the industry could be radically improved. Thus the simulation tool also became involved in actual design work that generated a number of design improvements to the real system. It was also shown that visualisation in the DES tool constitutes a vital feature in the design process, verifying detailed design of layout and equipment in the context of material flow dynamics. The kind of wood manufacturing studied embraces extensive material handling, which could be reproduced in detail, ?true-to-scale? in 3D, by the simulation tool used.