A pedagogical software tool for aiding the instruction of basic factory optimization concepts

Abstract

Today there are many academic software programs available to help students grasp the concepts taught to them in the classroom. Most of the software however, is intended either to be used outside of the classroom, or to teach a subject without the classroom or instructor entirely. This thesis presents a design and prototype for a pedagogical tool which is intended to be used in the classroom by the instructor to help demonstrate each concept to be conveyed. A prevailing problem in the Industrial Engineering domain is how to provide manufacturing students, studying production control, the needed factory experience without having to build and maintain an extremely expensive, and possibly dangerous, classroom factory facility. In an attempt to solve this problem, the Virtual Factory Environment model was designed and implemented. The model includes those elements necessary to emulate a real factory for educational purposes and are implemented in three main components: the factory operators (i.e. the instructor and students), the Virtual Factory Database, and the Virtual Factory Machine Emulator. The Virtual Factory Database houses all of the characteristics for a virtual factory and the parts to be produced. The Virtual Factory Database was implemented using the Microsoft Access Relational Database Management System. The Virtual Factory Machine Emulator is the students' interface into the virtual factory and was written in Microsoft Visual C++ using object oriented programming (OOP) techniques. The machine emulator communicates with the database using the Open Database Connectivity (ODBC) protocol and the Structured Query Language (SQL) Finally, this thesis provides two examples that illustrate how to use the Virtual Factory Environment in the classroom and a discussion of how the Virtual Factory Environment can be used to demonstrate Little's Law, push versus pull systems, and the effects of batch sizes on cycle time.