Decision support in factories of the future: An integrated business modelling technique.

This paper describes the development of an integrated modelling technique for the evaluation of business strategies. The modelling-based technique consists of three levels; firstly, an innovative, easily configurable, manufacturing simulator; secondly a generic activity based cost model; and thirdly, a high level strategic business model. The first level of the technique has been verified and validated with respect to both another modelling package and a real manufacturing facility. The activity based cost model constructed has been designed and developed to deal with all aspects of a product's cost, with an inbuilt facility to deal with sparse data. It has also been validated with data from industry and gave less than a 0.1% variation with calculated operating costs. A user interface has been developed which allows configuration of all levels of the business model with no need for modelling expertise.