A simulation analysis of the impact of production lot size and its interaction with operator competence on manufacturing system performance

In the process of production planning, planners have to define the production quantity to be loaded to the production line (commonly referred as “lot size”). The decision is mainly based on the primary concerns of avoiding late completion of contracts and minimizing costs. To provide more insights to the decision, this research aims to explore the impact of lot size and its interaction with operator competence on manufacturing system performance using simulation technique. During the simulation process, two inadequacies which hinder the representativeness of the simulation analysis are identified in the existing literature. They concern the inadequacy in simulating realistic operator learning curves and incompetent approach of simulation experimental analysis. A simulation model is proposed to refine these inadequacies before it is applied to explore the mentioned research issue. The simulation results confirm the significant effect of lot size and its interaction effect with operator competence on all performance measures.