A comparison of modelling paradigms for manufacturing line

The paper presents different approaches to simulation of a manufacturing line, namely the discrete event, system dynamics and graph theoretic approach. The modelling approaches are applicable to manufacturing as well as other systems. A software package called PROSIM has been developed at the University of Waterloo (UW), Canada for continuous system simulation. In this paper, we compare PROSIM with two other commercially available software packages, ARENA and ITHINK, using an example of a manufacturing line. The results obtained are in excellent agreement. The software packages and actual line are used as a research and teaching resource in the Design Research Centre at the Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore.