Optimizing the design and operation of a beer packaging line through an advanced simio-based DES tool

Discrete event simulation (DES) techniques cover a broad collection of methods and applications that allows imitating, assessing, predicting and enhancing the behavior of large and complex real-world processes. This work introduces a modern DES framework, developed with SIMIO simulation software, to optimize both the design and operation of a complex beer packaging system. The proposed simulation model provides a 3D user-friendly graphical interface which allows evaluating the dynamic operation of the system over time. In turn, the simulation model has been used to perform a comprehensive sensitive analysis over the main process variables. In this way, several alternative scenarios have been assessed in order to achieve remarkable performance improvements. Alternative heuristics and optimization by simulation can be easily embedded into the proposed simulation environment. Numerical results generated by the DES model clearly show that production and efficiency can be significantly enhanced when the packaging line is properly set up.