Simulation is an effective method for solving assembly system problems because of its wide applicability and because it provides a laboratory to study systems without the costs of building or modifying the real systems. However, it also has some disadvantages which limit its utilisation. Firstly, developing the simulation model may be time consuming and requires a simulation specialist, it does take training and practice before a beginner can perform moderately complicated simulation with a commercially available simulation language. Even for an experienced analyst, modeling and programming of a complicated system can be a laborious process and it usually takes longer than most companies can tolerate. Some simple facility can take a minimum of two weeks of modeling, programming and vali...[ Read more ]

Simulation is an effective method for solving assembly system problems because of its wide applicability and because it provides a laboratory to study systems without the costs of building or modifying the real systems. However, it also has some disadvantages which limit its utilisation. Firstly, developing the simulation model may be time consuming and requires a simulation specialist, it does take training and practice before a beginner can perform moderately complicated simulation with a commercially available simulation language. Even for an experienced analyst, modeling and programming of a complicated system can be a laborious process and it usually takes longer than most companies can tolerate. Some simple facility can take a minimum of two weeks of modeling, programming and validation.

Quick modeling methods for modeling assembly systems have drawn interests from industry and academics. Some earlier attempts have proposed various approaches with limited scopes. For example, R. Bruce Taylor and Hamdly A. Taha developed a quick modeling method with one specific type of assembly line. In this thesis, a Quick Simulation Modeling Method is proposed with five types of most commonly used assembly systems. The proposed method starts with selecting the appropriate assembly systems according to product and production requirements. They then mapped into a set of generic models for simulation. These generic models are represented in Activity Cycle Diagram (ACD). The users can then based on generic models to input resources in each activity and configuration of the activities. Hence, simulation models can be generated with the input parameters.

In addition, an experiment was conducted to show, to what extent, the Quick Modeling Approach is better than the traditional simulation modeling software. This experiment requires some participants to build simulation models with Quick Model Building Program (which was written by the author) and some participants to build models with Promodel. Assuming all the participants are manufacturing engineers who know their assembly line well, we want to see how quickly the participants can finish the model building and simulation process with and without the Quick Model Building program. At the ends, participants using Quick Model building program spent a shorter time to finish the exercise than those using Promodel.