Material flow simulation

Milestones on the way to a digital factory.

Tools for material flow simulations are now used globally. Today, there are many solutions for the simulation of production material flows, thanks to the SIMPRO system-developed by INPRO and other powerful software solutions, whose development dates back in part to the initiative of INPRO's partners. They form a core element of the digital factory.

This was not the case in the 1980's. Production processes were planned at that time for the most part without simulation support. The results were high costs of change and additional investments. Simulation testing was difficult and there were few specialists in this field.

INPRO's goal at the time was to establish the methods for material flow simulation in the planning departments of partner companies. The planners were to have a user-friendly system at their disposal, in order to assess and optimise production processes.

For this purpose, simulation systems and pre-prepared component libraries were developed with extensive standard strategies, which ensured high productivity when conducting simulation studies. To extend the application area, an integrated development environment was generated in order to create our own component libraries.

The result of this work was the SIMPRO simulation system. SIMPRO has carried out more than 500 simulation projects so far. An estimate made by the Fraunhofer Institute for Material Flow and Logistics demonstrated that such simulations could save up to 3% of the investments in a production system.

Even if complete digital securing of innovative production processes remains a vision, the use of material flow simulations has already shown that even partial elements of virtual factory planning can reduce real costs.