Use of Computer Simulation in Designing and Evaluating a Proposed Rough Mill for Furniture Interior Parts

The design of a rough mill for the production of interior furniture parts is used to illustrate a simulation technique for analyzing and evaluating established and proposed sequential production systems. Distributions representing the real-world random characteristics of lumber, equipment feed speeds and delay times are programmed into the simulation. An example is given of how bottlenecks are found and removed in order to design on paper a layout that will meet a set of goals before a single piece of equipment has been purchased. GPSS (a General Purpose Simulation System language) was used.