Modeling And Simulation Study For Advanced Production Cells Oriented To The Organizational Flexibility

Production cell has the advantage of taking production efficiency and flexibility into account simultaneously, which make it as one of the main manufacturing modes in manufacturing industries. However, as the market demand becoming more personalized and customized, production cells are faced with severe challenges such as production batch changes, product variety mix and equipment bottle-neck fluctuation, which have caused problems of insufficient flexibility, slow reaction speed, and poor exception coping ability. Aiming at overcoming these above problems, advanced production cells (APCs) such as autonomous production cell, agile manufacturing cell, lean production cell, and reconfigurable manufacturing cell have been proposed. These APCs emphasize the importance of the human factors and organizational innovation in manufacturing systems, and propose to enhance the organizational flexibility by adopting more flexible organization mode and high-qualified production workers simutaneously when enhancing the manufacturing flexibility of the equipment, so as to improve the overall performance of the APCs. So, to identify what are the connotation and characteristics of the organizational flexibility of APCs, what are the constitute elements of the organizational flexibility and their influence mechanism of these elements on the APCs, how to evaluate the flexibility performance of production organization, and how to quantitatively optimize the organizational flexibility, are not only the basic problems in analyzing and evaluating APCs, but also the key problems in realizing the organization innovation for APCs.To overcome the shortcomings of existing research on the connotation and constitute element analysis, quantitative evaluation and optimization method for the organizational flexibility of APCs, a modeling and simulation research for the organizational flexibility of APCs was carried out in this thesis, its main research contents include:(1) The connotation of the organizational flexibility of the production cells was defined, and the constitute elements of the organizational flexibility of the APCs were also clarified. By analyzing the influence of changing manufacturing environments on the APCs, the organizational flexibility of the production cells was defined as "the ability of the APCs’manufacturing team to cope with the dynamic changes of manufacturing environment". The constitute elements of the APCs’ organizational flexibility were then divided into flexibility element of the organization structure, flexibility element of the organization division, flexibility of the organization behaviors, and flexibility of the individual behaviors.(2) Based on the modeling theory of discrete event dynamic system and the theory of complex adaptive system, a human-machine integrated modeling and simulation method for the organizational flexibility of APCs was presented. Constituted by manufacturing process model, worker agent model, multi-agent based organizational model and human-machine interface, this integrated model can not only describe the discrete manufacturing process of products, but also capable of reflecting the worker’s autonomy, organizational coordination&cooperation and human-machine collaboration attributes of the APCs. The structure of the human-machine integrated model, and its running principle were discussed on detail.(3) By using Flexsim, dynamic linkage library (DLL) technology, and ADO technology etc., the human-machine integrated model was realized, and an organizational flexibility simulation platform was developed, and the effectiveness and the feasibility of the human-machine integrated model was also validated. Then, a simulation data-based calculation method for the organizational flexibility of APCs was provided, an evaluation index system constitutes production cycle fluctuation, machine availability fluctuation, and personnel workload balance coefficient fluctuation was constructed.(4) Taking an autonomous engine part production cell as engineering background, and by using a "model reconfiguration" based simulation method, several simulation experiments were designed and conducted from aspects of organization structure, organization division, organization behavior and individual behavior, which respectively studied the effects of hierarchy&litude and degree of centralization, different organization division strategies, different cooperation schemes, and human error&learning behaviors on the performance and organizational flexibility of the production cell, and corresponding management suggestions were finally generated and provided for the management of the autonomous engine part production cell.