Cyber-Physical System Modeling for Bottleneck Analysis of the Manufacturing Production Line of Core Machines

Manufacturing firms are constantly faced with operational challenges of ensuring that their existing manufacturing processes and systems can deliver expected production rates of high-quality products while minimizing the extensive use of resources. This holds for the Sakthi Auto Component Ltd. (SACL) core shop based in Coimbatore, TN, India, whose current core shop manufacturing production infrastructure consists of eleven distinct machines responsible for carrying out an eleven-step manufacturing process. Several case studies have been conducted to research possible interventions to improve the system. Despite adopting machining process modifications, system evaluations show that the manufacturing production line is still considered lacking and unable to meet the average 24300 monthly core demand. Bottleneck analysis is a standard manufacturing and production management approach to evaluate and increase system capacities relative to utilization and efficiency metrics. This paper illustrates an opportunity presented by Cyber-Physical systems (CPS) to automate the validation of improvements that are based on iterative implementations of bottleneck analysis by modelling the manufacturing production infrastructure of SACL using MATLAB SIMULINK. Following successive iterations of bottleneck analysis, the final model configuration could meet the expected demand of 24300 cores within 27 working days, with each day having a total of 8 work hours, and only 7 hours being productive. The simulation reported an 87.47% system utilization rate and a 99.96% system efficiency rate.