Backward simulation in food industry for facility planning and daily scheduling

in the light of high capital expenditure for manufacturing facilites in food and process industry, an increasing number of variants and frequenthy changing sales developments, simulation models are becoming more and more important for the support of capacity and production planning. In the following, the use of a simulation toolset for the support of tactical capacity planning and operative production planning is presented. It was implemented in cooperation with a global player of food industry. The challenge of the project was the implementation of a backward simulation. Instead of filling food from a tank into cups, the computer simulates the process inversely. The advantage of the chosen procedure is that the provision of all components of a dessert or yogurt product at the time of filling as well as an efficient utilization of resources is ensured.