Hierarchical simulation-based planning framework for resource allocation and balanced delay

In today's manufacturing and assembly line system, the reconfiguration issues are important than ever before. In this paper, a distributed manufacturing and assembly line case based on a major airline industry is considered and it is divided into production system (PS or high level) and production region (PR or low level). The problem at the PS level is to minimize balance delay among its PRs and the problem at the PR level is to maximize utilization of its factories and resources. A hierarchical distributed simulation-based framework is proposed to resolve the problems at the two levels in an integrated manner. At first in PR level, factories are balanced by allocating shared resources based on a proposed algorithm. Distributed simulation is then used to integrate the simulation models of PRs that exist at different geographical locations and to evaluate the results obtained from the proposed algorithms. Then, in the PS level, reassignment of different factories into regions is performed using another proposed algorithm considering utilizations of factories and resource bottleneck information. The above mentioned process is continued until desired improvement is achieved at the both levels. Experiments are conducted based on the case, and the results reveal that the proposed framework can reduce the balance delay among production regions, maximize resource utilizations as well as reduce cycle times in factories significantly.