Economic evaluation of the increase in production capacity of a high technology products manufacturing cell using discrete event simulation

This paper presents an application of the modeling and simulation methodology along with the Design of Experiments (DOE) to aid the decision makers to know the economic risk they are taking when there are many scenarios. Firstly, the production process was studied and documented by a SIPOC, an IDEF0 and a Flowchart. These techniques were combined to elaborate the simulation conceptual model. After that, the probability distributions were chosen and fed the computer model, built to emulate the real system. The simulation model was verified and statistically validated. Sixty four possible scenarios were tested, and in this case, the DOE may contribute to select the scenarios which are relevant to the economic analysis. The simulator used was Promodel^® which provided the output to fed the cash flow of each scenario. Finally, the Net Present Value (NPV) and the economic risk of each scenario were calculated.