They cannot be animated (so don’t expect them to walk through the digital factory in fluid motions) they can be used as representation to help you calculate travel distance to workstations, foot traffic, and throughput. Library objects include, among others, digital workers, with customizable productivity settings. The uninitiated may rely on the comprehensive Help section. Standard objects like Source (to represent a material dispensing point), Processor (to represent machines), Conveyors, Workstations (designated places for workers) come preloaded with default attributes, but to get a more accurate model of your own plant, you can create custom entities (for example, a boxing machine that’s available 90% of the time).įor those outside the plant management profession, certain input fields could be puzzling (for instance, a machine’s MTTR value, which stands for its mean time to recovery, or Exit Strategy, which sounds like a military policy but turns out to be, in this case, the method used by a machine to transfer its parts to another machine). Plant Simulation has a drag-and-drop interface, along with library objects you can readily put to use.
The company recently began offering free education licenses of Plant Simulation to high school, college, and university students, so the software also belongs in the classroom, in a manner of speaking. Siemens PLM Software‘s Plant Simulation, part of the company’s Tecnomatix suite, belongs to this class.
To faithfully create, record, and play out the interlocking operations of a manufacturing plant inside a computer, you may need a new class of software. The variations in these entities-the different rates at which they break down, the workers’ availability and shifts, and their per-hour throughput, to name but a few-quickly add up to a complex formula, no longer easily expressed in a spreadsheet or a flowchart. Mapping out the material flows from the dispensary to multiple processing machines, workstations, assembly points, and packing stations would require a lot more. But typical manufacturing sites are much more complex. For a simple plant setup-for example, a single point of material dispensation (a candy dropper), interrupted by a processing machine (a boxing machine), ending with a shipping station-a spreadsheet and a flowchart may be quite adequate.