Increasingly shorter product cycles, increasing investment costs and growing demands on quality and availability provide companies with difficult tasks in planning and operating production lines. In the future, therefore it will not be enough anymore to have a good product, but it will become more relevant also to produce this product in the shortest possible time and with the best possible use of all resources.

To minimize the problems associated with investment decisions risks putting companies use a computerized planning method. These methods allow the engineer, to explore the impact of planning and control measures on the real operation by an inexpensive simulation model in the computer, before the production system will be installed. A disadvantage of this method are the long computing times, which often lie in the range of hour or days.

In cooperation with IBM Germany Storage Systems GmbH we have developed mathematical methods for performance evaluation of manufacturing systems. We use analogies between production, physics and biology. Based on these models, the key performance indicators of a production system, such as the utilization of the work stations, the buffer occupancy and the time of passage through the system are calculated within seconds. A corresponding software environment allows the results to be represented graphically or in tabular form.

Following the acquisition of IBM Storage Systems Division by Hitachi system this software is in use at Hitachi San Jose.