Purpose

The main purpose of this paper is to develop a study of the determination of the most appropriate execution steps, necessary for the construction of modelling, simulation and optimization for the specific area of slaughter line balancing. And through the developed model to demonstrate the application of simulation to increase productivity in a large-size swine slaughterhouse, focusing on operator stations balancing. The built model may be applied to support the management of the plant, allowing to evaluate and decide the optimized scenario that meets current needs considering operational cost, production demand and productivity.

Design/methodology/approach

For the research development, the selected software supports the characteristics of the evaluated process, in this case, a discreet simulation with stochastics variables. The studied plant was modelled door by door, from the swine reception until the packaging area. The research methodology was based on lean manufacturing (LM) principles, particularly in workstations balancing, by optimizing the idle time of the operators, comparing with the cycle time of each task, in the evaluated workstations.

Findings

The achieved result with the modelling and simulation was the increase of 11.89% in plant productivity through manpower optimization. The study indicates that the simulation applied with LM concepts as operative stations balancing and value stream map can be a very useful tool to support decision-making for productivity improvement.

Originality/value

This study approaches how modelling and simulation can support decision-making to implement improvements associated to workforce balancing optimization, especially in the studied area (agribusiness, animal slaughter). The studied process presents great variability associated with the processing time of each phase, making the analysis and modelling more complex. The number of workstations involved, with more than 800 employees, is an important point in the research, considering that cases with higher values than the case presented were not identified in literature.

中文翻译：

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大型屠宰场的生产力提高：应用精益制造的模拟方法

目的

本文的主要目的是研究确定最合适的执行步骤，这对于特定屠宰线平衡区域的建模、仿真和优化的构建是必要的。并通过所开发的模型来演示在大型生猪屠宰场中应用仿真提高生产力，重点是操作员站的平衡。构建的模型可用于支持工厂的管理，允许评估和决定满足当前需求的优化方案，考虑运营成本、生产需求和生产力。

设计/方法/方法

对于研究开发，所选软件支持评估过程的特征，在这种情况下，是带有随机变量的离散模拟。所研究的工厂从猪的接收区到包装区都是逐门建模的。该研究方法基于精益制造 (LM) 原则，特别是在工作站平衡方面，通过优化操作员的空闲时间，与评估工作站中每个任务的周期时间进行比较。

发现

建模和仿真的结果是通过人力优化使工厂生产力提高了 11.89%。该研究表明，使用 LM 概念作为操作站平衡和价值流图的模拟可以成为支持提高生产力的决策的非常有用的工具。

原创性/价值

本研究探讨了建模和仿真如何支持决策制定，以实施与劳动力平衡优化相关的改进，特别是在研究领域（农业综合企业、动物屠宰）。所研究的过程呈现出与每个阶段的处理时间相关的巨大可变性，使分析和建模更加复杂。涉及的工作站数量（超过 800 名员工）是研究中的一个重点，考虑到文献中没有发现比所呈现的案例具有更高价值的案例。