Development of virtual engineering simulation for lean education

Global competition and customer demands are pressing modern industry operations to become leaner. The race among the global corporations to go lean demands engineers with an in-depth understanding of lean philosophies. An overview of current methods for teaching lean shows that they include small scale hands-on projects, presentations, and guest lectures. There is a need to incorporate a more immersive virtual simulation to further inspire students. Many lean simulation games are available in the market; however, they lack simplicity, ability to store the results, and modeling power. The goal of this research is to develop a virtual simulation platform, enabling students to perform various experiments by applying lean concepts, while addressing the above-mentioned difficulties. Assignments addressing the implementation of various lean tools are developed as a mode of utilizing the virtual simulation model in a lean course. In order to make the simulation more interesting, attractive, and learner friendly, the VE-Suite design includes user-friendly dialogue boxes, graphical models of machines, and an editable layout. The simulation platform enables students to implement various lean concepts such as just-in-time (JIT), standard work, takt time, single minute exchange of dies (SMED), kaizen, kanban, and U-layout by modifying the process parameters such as process times, setup times, layout, and demand rates. The simulation starts with a traditional push type mass production line consisting four work stations. The students interact with the production line and apply lean tools to improve it. By providing a more immersive learning experience for the students the research hopes to improve understanding and retention of lean concepts --Abstract, page iii