Use of RESOURCE blocks in SLAM II for the evaluation of operator-machine assignments

  • Authors:

  • Lynn S. Lachenmaier;Jeffery K. Cochran

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of Industrial and Management Systems Engineering, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ;Department of Industrial and Management Systems Engineering, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ

  • Venue:
  • WSC '96 Proceedings of the 28th conference on Winter simulation
  • Year:
  • 1996

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Abstract

This paper examines the problem of assigning jobs to a set of manufacturing machine operators. This classic problem involves a set of semi-skilled personnel who can run subsets of machinery. The number of operators assigned to groups of machinery can be varied to optimize throughput. While the operator-machine problem has been studied in previous literature using a wide variety of analytical algorithms, we look at a solution that uses the RESOURCE block in SLAM II to simulate possible operator-machine combinations. A semiconductor fabrication facility was modeled using the operators as resources, and four alternate assignments were compared. Our concept for developing a simulation model of this problem in SLAM II proved to be an effective way to evaluate operator-machine assignments.