Virtual production planning of a high-speed train using a discrete event simulation based approach

This paper deals with an application of virtual simulation within the manufacturing process of a high-speed train. This project was born from a need to reorganize the train assembly line of a rail transport engineering company. Nowadays, manufacturing firms need to improve productivity in terms of higher throughput, shorter lead time, low work-in-process and high resource utilization. Today, the use of a Discrete Event Simulation (DES) tool is common for supporting engineers in reaching these targets, representing a valid help in what-if analyses and in the measurement or validation of a solution. In this work, differently from the common use, it has been developed a virtual model whose function is not to measure and/or validate a solution of a problem, but to generate a solution that will be nearly to the optimum. This paper describes DES tools, the methodology used in this work, the case-study and the obtained results.