Planning and management of a brewery production with the support of computer simulation.

Abstract

Planning and management of the process of a beer production is a complex task, both from technological and managerial point of view. The reason is high number of process stages and their parameters (in relation to the type of final product and to the production portfolio) together with technical limitations of technological equipment (capacity of silos, volume of fermentation and filtration tanks, their filling and emptying rate, cleaning of filters etc.), and also operating conditions (availability of raw material, production facilities, shift regime in sectors of the production with manual labour, availability of filling lines, storage logistics of finished products, etc.). This paper deals with a way in which the process of beer production and bottling can be planned and controlled with the support of a computer model (from input of raw material to store of packaged products). In the introduction general information about the related issue of discreteevent simulation of production processes with the aim of their optimization is discussed. The main part presents an add-on of simulation software, which enables generating of a brewery simulation model based on operational data which are processed in a spreadsheet. The example of a case study demonstrates the possibility to carry out simulation experiments in order to find and remove bottlenecks in production and to enhance utilization of production facilities and thus productivity of the entire brewery. The conclusion summarizes findings related to the current level of simulation technology.Planning and management of the process of a beer production is a complex task, both from technological and managerial point of view. The reason is high number of process stages and their parameters (in relation to the type of final product and to the production portfolio) together with technical limitations of technological equipment (capacity of silos, volume of fermentation and filtration tanks, their filling and emptying rate, cleaning of filters etc.), and also operating conditions (availability of raw material, production facilities, shift regime in sectors of the production with manual labour, availability of filling lines, storage logistics of finished products, etc.). This paper deals with a way in which the process of beer production and bottling can be planned and controlled with the support of a computer model (from input of raw material to store of packaged products). In the introduction general information about the related issue of discreteevent simulation of production processes with the aim of their optimization is discussed. The main part presents an add-on of simulation software, which enables generating of a brewery simulation model based on operational data which are processed in a spreadsheet. The example of a case study demonstrates the possibility to carry out simulation experiments in order to find and remove bottlenecks in production and to enhance utilization of production facilities and thus productivity of the entire brewery. The conclusion summarizes findings related to the current level of simulation technology.

Keywords

• beer
• beer production
• discrete event simulation
• simulation model
• simulation experiment