Integrated Modelling and Simulation Method for the Project-Type Manufacturing Process: Shipyard Dock Shop Hoisting Process

The dock shop hoisting process is the bottleneck stage of the entire shipbuilding lifecycle, with a crucial influence on a shipyard's competitive goals of cost and delivery time. The complexity and particularity of the hoisting process, which tends to be a project-type manufacturing process, leads to more difficulties in exploiting potentialities for a productivity improvement via computer simulation technology. In order to overcome the deficiency of the previous modelling and simulation methods in terms of the applicability to project-type manufacturing cases, the characteristics of the hoisting process are carefully investigated, followed by a discussion of the specific requirements of constructing a simulation suitable for this kind of process. Then, we apply a task-centric idea to establish an information flow and work flow integrated model (named IWI) that can properly abstract the dynamic behavior of the hoisting process, in which the interrelations between the production elements are quite different from those in the general discrete manufacturing process. According to the mechanism revealed by the IWI model, a simulation algorithm is further designed as the foundation to realize a subsequently developed prototype system. The validity of the proposed modelling and simulation method is tested with a case study on a group of actual dock shop hoisting processes, with multiple indices indicating how well the production system performs output through the simulation experiment.