Using System Dynamics Simulations to Compare Capacity Models for Production Planning

While a variety of optimization formulations of production planning problems have been proposed over the last fifty years, the majority of these are based on simple models of capacity that fail to reflect the nonlinear relationship between workload and lead times induced by the queuing behavior of capacitated production resources. We use system dynamics simulations of a simple capacitated production system to examine the performance of several different capacity models that yield load-dependent lead times, and relate these models to those used in system dynamics models of production systems