Facing a new round of industrial revolution, the development of intelligent manufacturing is regarded as key to enhancing competitiveness of manufacturing industry by many countries. Customized production, an important feature of intelligent manufacturing,  is usually achieved by flexible reconfigurable production system. Modeling and simulation optimization methods are the basis for building a flexible reconfigurable production system.

Recently, a group of Chinese resreachers at Shenyang Institute of Automation, the Chinese Academy of Sciences proposed a general modeling and comprehensive optimization method for simulation of a flexible assembly shop. The proposed method could optimize the whole production process and the allocation of production resources. The progress was published on the latest issue of International Journal of Simulation Modeling.

Considering the complexity and limitation of optimizing the production performance of an assembly shop by mathematical model and intelligent algorithms, the proposed optimization method is based on Discrete Event Simulation (DES) and intelligent algorithms. Reseachers came up with a general modeling method of logistics simulation for DES. This method is capable of describing uniformly the logistics process of all workstations in a discrete workshop, establishing quickly the production model of the discrete workshop, and providing an efficient modeling method for the production simulation of a complex discrete workshop. Moreover, the optimal production process, layout planning and production allocation are achieved via the improved genetic algorithm and multi-factor experiments.

The proposed method has seen effective application in many intelligent workshop planning projects.