Högskolan i Skövde

The modern industry has an increasing demand for simulation software able to help workers and decision-makers visualize the outputs of a specific process in a fast, accurate way. In this report, a comparative study between FACTS (Factory Analyses in ConcepTual phase using Simulation), Plant Simulation, and PSE (Production System Engineering) Toolbox is done regarding their capacity to simulate models with increasing complexity, how accurate they are in their outputs with different optimized buffer allocations, and how well they perform on the task of detecting the bottlenecks of a process. Benchmarking simulation software requires an experimental approach, and for gathering and organizing all the data generated using external programs like MATLAB, C, Excel, and R are used.

A high level of automatization is required as otherwise the manual input of data would take too long to be effective.The results conclude on major concordances among FACTS and Plant Simulation as the most used commercial DES (Discrete Event Simulation) software and a more mathematical-theoretical approach coming from PSE Toolbox. The optimization done in the report links to sustainability, with an enhanced TH improving the ecological, social and economic aspects, and to Lean philosophy using lean buffers that smooth and improve the production flow.