Formal modelling of release control policies as a plug-in for performance evaluation of manufacturing systems

Control policies significantly affect the performance of manufacturing systems, driving the need to assess their impact during both the design and operational phases. Performance evaluation tools can provide a relevant support, but their full exploitation is hindered by the difficulty of considering the huge variety of control decisions that are interwoven with manufacturing system configurations. Herein, a formal modelling approach is presented to jointly describe a manufacturing system and its release control policies, thus enabling the definition of performance evaluation models in terms of different policies. An application case is provided for the automatic generation of discrete event simulation models to assess the viability of the approach for assembly lines. (C) 2020 CIRP. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.