Page 92 - Educating the Engineer of 2020: Adapting Engineering Education to the New Century

Educating the Engineer of 2020: Adapting Engineering Education to the New Century
http://www.nap.edu/catalog/11338.html

INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY 75

customized planners and calendars, they find they need more analysis
of the printing cell, because more varieties of products and smaller batch
sizes have slowed printing.
When a new printing job arrives, it must wait until the current
group of jobs is completed. When all of the jobs in the current group
are finished, the new jobs are lined up in a specific order. The student’s
task is to improve the operational efficiency of the printing cell by mini-
mizing the so-called “make-span” (the time it takes to complete the
entire group of parts ready to proceed into the process). A simulation
model of a printing cell is provided to help students predict operational
improvements to the system (see Figure 2). The students are told that
make-span should be their primary focus, but they may want to also pay
attention to the queue sizes and the average time jobs remain in the
printing area. They are told that they can manage three key parameters:
(1) the number of work centers; (2) the number of hours per shift; and
(3) the number of shifts per week.

FIGURE 2 Simulation animation for the Colebee case study.

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