Simulating Primary Manufacturing Area (PMA) activities of fixed trailing edge panels production

Simulation clearly has the potential to play an important role in manufacturing decision-making at many levels. This simulation study is conducted at the local manufacturing plant that manufactures fixed trailing edge panels for the aerospace industry. The model focused on operational activities at the primary manufacturing area of cutting and laminating of aircraft’s composite parts. The model built was used to investigate a variety of issues, for example to determine the impact of a proposed change, without affecting production.The result shows that when production rate was increased by 20% to investigate the current plant capacity, the current resources capacity was unable to tolerate this increment. From the model experimentation, an increase of 60 minutes working time for ply cutter machines and 75 minutes of lay up operators found to be the best design to meet the expected production throughput and increase resources utilisation

Optimizing University Shuttle Buses to Reduce Students’ Waiting Time Using a Discrete Event Simulation Technique

Shuttle buses replacing private transports have long been used to reduce traffic congestion in a university campus. However, to estimate the optimal number of buses taking into account human behaviour using a manual method to provide a better service is very difficult. This is especially true when the shuttle buses have multiple routes and are significantly affected by unpredictable human behaviour such as their stochastic arrival at the available bus stops. This paper thus employs modelling and simulation methodologies specifically a Discrete Event Simulation (DES) technique to observe the effects of various configuration of bus number to student waiting time. For this, a DES model for bus transportation in a university using various available modules in Arena software was first developed. The simulation model was then fed with relevant data; e.g., the total number of students having classes at certain time periods, the current allocation of the buses for each bus stop, etc. The model was later used as a test bed for various configurations and analysis of the number of buses and their effects on students waiting time including their optimal number. The simulation results show that the current number of used buses can be reduced to its optimal number while maintaining student waiting time. This simulation model employs a new approach of using a transport module to transport a huge amount of entities to multiple stations as opposed to its traditional usage to only transport a single entity to a particular station

Simulation-aided production of aircraft's composite parts

Simulation has been successfully applied in many different areas such as manufacturing, service system, healthcare, transportation, supply chain, and etc. The opportunities to cut costs and to improve service levels in these sectors are tremendous by applying this technology. One of the largest application areas for simulation modelling is that of manufacturing systems, which has been applied for more than 40 years. This study is conducted at the local manufacturing plant that manufactures composite products for the aerospace industry. In this study, simulation technique is applied to model the existing system to simulate the design and operational policies of the plant production process, which can be used to improve the performance of the different activities at the plant. The model focused on activities at Secondary Manufacturing Area (SMA) of aircrafts composites parts

Batch Sizing and Lot Splitting Strategies to Reduce Cycle Time in Semiconductor Assembly Process

Increasingly, products with customized features are manufactured in small batches based on demand by unique customers. Such diversity leads to high product mix, thus severely impacting both production planning and scheduling activities such as frequent equipment setup and conversion. Despite increased complexity, production continues being pressured on minimal cycle time to meet on-time delivery requirements. Focusing on the most challenging process, which is assembly, this paper presents batch sizing and lot splitting strategies to improve production cycle times. In the event of too short cycle time, overlapping technique is the most applicable, while “parallel” technique applies to normal cycle time. The commonly known “batch queue” technique works well for long cycle time such as new product qualification lot

Simulating Primary Manufacturing Area (PMA) Activities of Fixed Trailing Edge Panels Production

Simulation clearly has the potential to play an important role in manufacturing decision-making at many levels. This simulation study is conducted at the local manufacturing plant that manufactures fixed trailing edge panels for the aerospace industry. The model focused on operational activities at the primary manufacturing area of cutting and laminating of aircraft’s composite parts. The model built was used to investigate a variety of issues, for example to determine the impact of a proposed change, without affecting production. The result shows that when production rate was increased by 20% to investigate the current plant capacity, the current resources capacity was unable to tolerate this increment. From the model experimentation, an increase of 60 minutes working time for ply cutter machines and 75 minutes of lay up operators found to be the best design to meet the expected production throughput and increase resources utilisation.

Constructing a customer satisfaction model for a utility service industry using partial least squares approach

The purpose of this research is to explore the effect of Image, Customer Expectation, Perceived Quality and Perceived Value on Customer Satisfaction, and to investigate the effect of Image and Customer Satisfaction on Customer Loyalty of mobile phone provider in Malaysia. The result of this research is based on data gathered online from international students in one of the public university in Malaysia.Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM) has been used to analyze the data that have been collected from the international students’ perceptions.The results found that Image and Perceived Quality have significant impact on Customer Satisfaction.Image and Customer Satisfaction ware also found to have significantly related to Customer Loyalty.However, no significant impact has been found between Customer Expectation with Customer Satisfaction, Perceived Value with Customer Satisfaction, and Customer Expectation with Perceived Value.It is hoped that the findings may assist the mobile phone provider in production and promotion of their services

Customer satisfaction model for mobile phone service providers in Malaysia

This paper presents the investigation on the effect of image, customer expectation, perceived quality and perceived value on customer satisfaction of mobile phone providers in Malaysia.Then, exploration on the effect of image and customer satisfaction on customer loyalty is also described.Data is gathered through online questionnaire distributed to international students in a selected public university in Malaysia. Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM) has been used to analyze the data.The results found that image and perceived quality have significant impact on customer satisfaction with the regression coefficient values of 0.398 and 0.382 respectively.Image and customer satisfaction were also found to have significantly related to customer loyalty with the regression coefficient values of 0.378 and 0.409 respectively. On the other hand, there is no significant impact found between customer expectation and customer satisfaction, perceived value with customer satisfaction, and customer expectation with perceived value

Conceptual model of sustainable lean and green manufacturing management system: Initial stage

The concept of lean and green manufacturing management has recently gained interest among the researchers and practitioners in the area of manufacturing management because it can promote good business sense and being environmentally friendly at the same time.The manufacturing process in automotive industry is exceptionally challenging, characterized by increasing complexity and significant relationship with the deterioration of environment.This paper proposes a framework for a sustainable lean and green manufacturing management system with specific emphasize on the automotive industry.The framework consists of a conceptual model which focuses on the initial stages in moving towards planning,design and implementation phases of sustainable lean and green manufacturing management system

Modelling an outpatient unit in a clinical health centre using discrete event simulation

This paper describes a project paper of a simulation modelling course.It presents the potential of computer simulation in modelling the current performance of an outpatient department of a clinical health centre in a rural area.The model was run using Arena student version 14.5.From the 60 replication length run, the obtained result shows that the patient’s waiting time is 26.4 minutes, which is lesser than the established standard waiting time of 30 minutes