A new technique for modelling production control schemes in manufacturing systems

Abstract

This paper presents a new modelling technique to model continuous manufacturing systems. The new dynamic model is based on analogies with electrical systems, and it has the capability to explicitly specify production control schemes including control points, material and information flow paths, and logical operations. The electrical analogues provide an excellent tool to model control signals and logical operations. This is especially important for pull control schemes where qualitative descriptions often found in the literature can be ambiguous. The model provides standard graphical representations and governing equations to describe both the steady state and transient responses of continuous manufacturing systems. For deterministic systems, these equations can be solved to obtain closed-form solutions. For stochastic systems, numerical solutions can be obtained for any probabilistic distribution. The proposed technique is demonstrated by modelling push and a variety of pull systems.

Keywords:

• control schemes
• dynamic modelling
• continuous manufacturing systems
• electrical analogues
• graphical representation
• CONWIP, MAXWIP, kanban