International Journal of Computer Theory and Engineering

Abstract

T Presented in this paper is the development of the simulator for In-plant MHS (Material Handling System) analysis of the assembly line. The MHS congestion on the assembly line prevents feeders and vehicles from traveling freely on the assembly line. Accordingly, congestion in a MHS can reduce the performance of the system. Although there have been many existing studies for reducing congestion in the system, they are difficult to apply to a work-site directly, because most of them have been studied in mathematical approaches. An intuitive way is to apply a satisfactory result of simulator to analyze current system and new system. The proposed simulator to perform the simulation uses simulation model, simulation engine and Feeder manager. The MHS congestion analysis simulation model consists of five nodes: the vehicle node, the buffer node, the work node, the source node and the sink node. The simulation engine has an event calendar to store events, and the engine repeatedly calls the events on the event calendar. The feeding manager which performs a role of route and schedule of feeders is the main idea of an MHS analysis simulator. The implemented simulator can be utilized to analyze the efficiency of MHS and working balance among feeders.