A STUDY ON PROCESS FLEXIBILITY CONFIGURATION

Abstract

By attempting to combine an optimization model with a simulation model, the main objective of the thesis is to develop an application program, which can be readily employed and utilized as an end-user programming application, assisting organisations in their decision making with regards to investment issues on process flexibility configurations. This thesis had developed numerous functionalities into the application to allow the application to replicate different kinds of manufacturing scenarios. Naming a few of these functionalities would include, the ability to address setup cost issue, ability to allow different plants to be of different efficiency when producing different products, and the ability to perform the desired correlation between the product demands. However, due to the long run time needed to search for the “optimal” configuration, this thesis went on further to develop, utilizing the developed application, a heuristic algorithm based on the “greedy” approach. This heuristic algorithm is capable of searching for a configuration with value close to the “optimal” configuration, in a fraction of the time needed instead to search for the “optimal” configuration, achieving in developing a practical application program.