Mesoscopic Discrete-Rate-Based Simulation Models for Production and Logistics Planning

The application of mesoscopic discrete rate simulation models for two typical planning tasks in the automotive industry are demonstrated by the authors to illustrate the capability of this modelling class to meet the requirements of logistics and production planners by providing more accurate simulation results. Typically, planning engineers solve these tasks with detailed microscopic simulation models because of the availability of object-based discrete event simulation tools in the automotive industry, which leads to complicated and slow models. However, the combined use of discrete rate and discrete event modeling in mescoscopic models can represent logistics flow processes on an aggregated level through piecewise-constant flow rates by applying the discrete rate simulation paradigm instead of modelling individual flow objects leading to fast model building and computation.