IE 541 – Spring 2023 Practical Exam 03/06/2023

Consider the 4-machine Flexible Manufacturing System (FMS) shown below. The FMS produces two part
types (A and B) and their processing sequences are given in the table below.

Step A B
1 S1 S2
2 S2 S4
3 S3 S1
4 S4 S3

The capacities and processing times for the 4 stations are given in the table below.

Processing Times (minutes)

Station Capacity (c) A B
S1 1 triangular(1, 2, 3) uniform(6, 8)
S2 1 exponential(2) exponential(2)
S3 2 exponential(6.67) exponential(6.67)
S4 1 uniform(2, 4) exponential(1)

Parts arrive to the FMS from another location in the facility at the rate of 15 per hour and the interarrival
times are uniformly distributed between 2.5 and 5.5 minutes. Approximately 67% of the arriving parts are
type A and the remaining 33% are type B. Develop a Simio model of this FMS using the following
guidelines/requirements:
1. Using the dimensions in the drawing, make your model approximately to-scale. That is, the stations
should be approximately 10 meters apart and the entrance and exit should be located as show in the
drawing.
2. Entities should travel at a speed of 0.25 meters/second. Type A entities should be the default green
color and type B entities should be red.
3. Use a Status Label to track the number of entities in the S1 queue.
4. Create a status plot that displays (1) the number of entities in the S3 queue, (2) the average number of
entities in the system. Use a time range of 15 hours for the plot.
5. Machine S4 has random failures with the uptime between failures following a uniform distribution with
parameters 2 and 5 (hours) and the repair time following a triangular distribution with parameters 30,
40, 50 (minutes).
IE 541 – Spring 2023 Practical Exam 03/06/2023

6. Create a Status Pie chart that displays the percentage of time S4 spends in the busy, idle, and failed
states.
7. Entities should move from S1 to their next destination using workers.
8. Create an Add-on process in S4 to delay entities for 10 seconds after being processed.
9. Use 3D object (Like machines) to change each server symbol.
10. Create an experiment with 15 replications of 500 hours (each) and the following experiment responses:
a. Average number of type A parts in the System
b. Maximum number of type B parts in the System
c. The utilization of S4
d. Throughput
11. Create and run another experiment (15 replications of 500 hours (each)) to optimize the average number
in system using the OptQuest feature in Simio. Create reference properties to represent the number of
servers at S3 and S4.
Maximize NIS
Subject to:
S3 + S4 <= 5
1 <= S3 <= 4
1 <= S4 <= 2