Towards a virtual factory for high-mix low-volume production systems
report
This report explores the development of a virtual factory approach tailored for high-mix lowvolume (HMLV) production systems, dealing with a wide variety of products produced in small batches. The virtual factory provides system architects with the means to reason about performance of the high-tech equipment systems they design in different scenarios. Two simulation approaches are evaluated. The first approach involves commercial tools (AnyLogic and FlexSim), which encode production recipes within process flows. The second approach involves a proprietary, hierarchical simulation concept implemented in POOSL, which accepts recipes as input but requires manual priority management. Building on these insights, we propose a new virtual factory concept comprising two main phases: recipe selection and recipe scheduling. The concept allows users to configure factory scenarios, select among multiple production recipes per product, and optimize schedules according to various criteria such as timing, cost, and resource utilization. An incremental scheduling concept is proposed to efficiently explore the scheduling space. The concept is designed to be extensible, supporting future integration of reinforcement learning for adaptive scheduling strategies. The implementation of the incremental scheduling concept is planned for 2026.
TNO Identifier
1022828
Publisher
TNO
Collation
24 p.
Place of publication
Eindhoven