Manufacturing simulation
Digital twin of the production line
- Challenge
- Every proposed change to the line, whether a new product mix, a reordered station or a shift pattern, had to be argued from experience, because the only way to test it was to try it on the real line and accept the cost of being wrong.
- Approach
- We built a simulation of the line calibrated against its own historical throughput, cycle times and failure rates, so its baseline behaviour matches what the plant actually did. Planners run a proposed change against it and get throughput, bottleneck and utilisation figures before anything is moved, with the model re-calibrated as new production data arrives.
4×
improvementfaster to evaluate a proposed line change
- Python
- SimPy
- Databricks
- Azure
- Next.js
- PostgreSQL
Outcome
Line changes are now argued with a simulated result attached, and the debate has moved from whose experience to trust to which assumption in the model to examine.
Sector: Manufacturing