Optimization and Simulation of Manufacturing Systems

Production planning and scheduling are critical in matters of cost reduction and performance improvement, crucial factors due to the highly competitive nature of today's industry. The technological development allowed the emergence of hybrid methods of optimization and simulation to perform the referred actions with better results.The proposed method consists in the interaction between a Linear Programming model and a simulation model, being the latter used as an evaluator of the solution proposed by the first. In the case of an impossible solution, the simulation results will serve as input to the LP model to adjust some parameters in an intent to produce more realistic results. The proposed methodology was applied to a case study concerning a make-to-order company, JPM Indústria.The expected results should prove the proposed method to outperform other commonly used methods, and be satisfactory in handling the case study's problems, namely its bottleneck situation. Moreover, the results should support the proposed method as a viable alternative for production planning and scheduling problems