Productivity improvement in the wood industry using simulation and artificial intelligence

The objective of this article is to present the results obtained after using a simulation optimization methodology applied to a production line from a secondary manufacturing wood processing plant of a well known Chilean mill. For this reason a simulation model constructed in ARENA, was integrated to a genetic algorithm heuristic. The results obtained show that using a different configuration of the plant resources, it is possible to reduce the total average cycle time in 18%. The resource configuration needed to reach this result was obtained evaluating just 1.6% of the total number of possible combinations.