Utveckling av ett standardiserat operatörsobjekt i plant simulation

Sammanfattning: This thesis work in automation technology at 30 credits is conducted at Volvo Cars Cooperation (VCC) in collaboration with the University of Skövde. With the current staffing method VCC are experiencing difficulties achieving an optimal utilization of operators as there has been difficult to ascertain how much work an operator can handle. Operators are an often overlooked part of simulation studies because they are complex to model. The completed thesis consists of developing a standardized operator object in the simulation software Plant Simulation, developed by Siemens. Using this object, it will be easier to staff optimally with respect to the number of work areas, operator skills and how many operators that are required for the given work areas. The existing VCC Plant Simulation library already has an object for operators. This operator object was used as the basis for the development of the new operator object. When developing the new object, data collection was made in form of both qualitative and quantitative data to find out what functionality the new object needed. The existing object was evaluated against the functionality requirements to determine what were needed to be added, removed or modified. Five main areas were considered important to develop: (1) operators that can work across two or more work areas, (2) walking time for operators, (3) learning effect, (4) the learning curve for operators and (5) operators who work on different shifts. The learning curve was only partly developed, but the other four areas were fully implemented. In order to test and analyze the object, three experiments were carried out using different case studies, where one of these cases studies was a real production line. The experimental design was jointly created with the VCC reference group and the University of Skövde. The main objectives of the experiments were to reduce the number of operators and increase throughput per hour. The result of the optimisation of the real production line showed that a significantly smaller staffing could be achieved without a major effect on the throughput. The results of the project were that a standardized operator object was developed according to the specifications and objectives set for the project. This object provides the ability to quickly and easily implement operators in a simulation model. To verify the applicability of the operator object, it was successfully imported and used for simulation-based optimisation in three different simulation models. The operator object also contains functionalities that provide more realistic operators, such as the walk time to the operations, operators that can work across several work areas and competence for operators as well as learning. The results of this project involve a simpler implementation of more realistic operators and thus lead to more realistic simulation models.