A Flexible Simulation Support for Production Planning and Control in Small and Medium Enterprises

For efficient, effective and economical production operation management in a manufacturing unit of an organization, it is essential to integrate the production planning and control system into an enterprise resource planning. Today's planning systems suffer from a low range in planning data which results in unrealistic delivery times. One of the root causes is that production is influenced by uncertainties such as machine breakdowns, quality issues and the scheduling principle. Hence, it is necessary to model and simulate production planning and controls (PPC) with information dynamics in order to analyze the risks that are caused by multiple uncertainties. In this context, a new approach to simulate PPC systems is exposed in this paper, which aims at visualizing the production process and comparing key performance indicators (KPIs) as well as optimizing PPC parameters under different uncertainties in order to deal with potential risk consuming time and effort. Firstly, a production system simulation is created to quickly obtain different KPIs (e.g. on time delivery rate, quality, cost, machine utilization, WIP) under different uncertainties, which can be flexibly set by users. Secondly, an optimization experiment is conducted to optimize the parameters of PPC with regard to the different KPIs. An industrial case study is used to demonstrate the applicability and the validity of the proposed approach.