The allocation of improvement programs in a flow shop for single and multi-products: a simulation assessment

The continuous improvement is crucial to increase the company's competitiveness in today's market. This paper proposes a multi-dimension simulation environment to test improvement programs in a flow shop context. The simulator developed tests the programs proposed in the literature: centralised, distributed and hybrid. The main original contributions of this research are: a simulation environment with higher details; the analysis of several performance measures as the throughput, lead time, work in process, average utilisation and the defected products for each workstation of the production line; the case of flow shop with multi-products. The experimental plan concerns the change of the following issues: set-up times, bottleneck position and process times. The flow shop without improvement programs is the benchmark of the performance measures. The simulation results show how the centralised policy is the better in a single product case, while the hybrid policy leads to the better results in case of multi-products.