Computer simulation of a PCB production line: metamodeling approach

This paper presents the results of two simulation models to investigate the effects of push and pull systems on a printed circuit board (PCB) manufacturing process at an electronics company in Ankara, Turkey. The current manufacturing process is a push system where the large batches of work-in-process are routed from one operation to another along a production line with 13 stations. It is shown that with the proposed pull system, the daily productivity can be increased by 12%. Through metamodeling with a regression metamodel analysis, the batch size optimization problem is considered for the proposed pull system of this factory producing PCBs which are used as main parts for many electronic devices such as tachometers, cash registers and printers. The regression metamodel greatly reduced the cost, time, and amount of the effort spent in analyzing the simulation. The model was validated and shown to provide good approximations to simulation results. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.