This research was conducted using simulation optimization methods to solve the bottleneck problem in manufacturing process, aiming at optimize the system performance. The Petri nets is used to describe the production process under Push/Conwip control mode for a typical JIT flexible manufacturing system. The ExSpect simulation platform is used to analog JIT flexible manufacturing system production process. A large amount of simulation tests have been done, with different quantity of demands and different buffer size limitation. Simulation processes give out visual description of the machine utilization, the position of bottleneck, and the relationship between the number of Kanban with the system performance, as well as the characteristics of control modes, and other helpful information. Simulation results show that the problem of bottleneck or hunger of the production line can be solve by setting bottleneck area kanban number and buffer size; and setting processing ratio between bottleneck area and parallel area can eliminate the bottleneck and improve system performance.

The modeling and simulation issues of the flexible manufacturing system under Just-in-Time environment is addressed in this paper. A typical flexible manufacturing system has been used as the study case, and its Petri nets model with Kanban has been presented. Since bottleneck or hunger resources in the manufacturing system usually have bad influence on the production process, more attentions were paid to the bottleneck identification and digestion in support of the proposed modeling and simulation mechanism in this paper. The machine utilization, under the premise of meeting custom needs just-in-time, is used as the main measure, while the trigger priority and the kanban numbers are two main adjusted artifices. Therewith, a large number of numerical simulations are investigated and detail discussions are proposed further. The simulation results show that the proposed Petri nets based modeling technique, as while as the bottleneck identification and digestion strategies, are feasible and effective.