The design and analysis of material handling systems using simulation

The design of modern automated manufacturing and assembly systems is necessarily associated with the need to simultaneously develop the concept of efficient intra-logistics systems. Effective integration of production resources with intralogistics systems for transport and handling equipment requires, among others determining the layout of transport paths, the type of transport means, their capacity, number of actuators or number of containers, etc. In the process of solving individual partial problems and design, various methods and techniques supporting decision making are used, including mathematical methods, heuristics, or artificial intelligence methods. Due to the complexity, they are often approximate or suboptimal methods. Therefore, there is a need to verify the solutions obtained, especially in connection with other subsystems in the conditions of various data and parameters related to production orders. To this end, an approach based on the process of automatically generating simulation models is proposed. The integration of simulation systems with CAD systems based on data mapping with the proposed software solutions using internal programming languages allows the automation of the process of creating the designed handling system.