ANALYSIS OF THE PRODUCTIVITY IN STRUCTURAL STEEL FABRICATION PROCESSES Evaluation and comparison of different Simulation-Software for the analysis and optimization of production processes at steel fabricators

Structural Steel Fabrication is a process in which there is a wide variety of product mix and where most of the products are unique in nature. A lot of work has been done to analyze the use of Discrete Event Simulation in various manufacturing and construction projects for application of lean concepts and other purposes to detect opportunities for optimization. However, there is a lot of different Discrete Event Simulation (DES) Software available in the market. After a first evaluation, 5 different software tools were selected that all claim to identify bottlenecks in processes and optimize or improve them. This paper specifically takes the complexity of Structural Steel Fabrication Process into consideration and uses these 5 different Software Simulation tools available to model these processes. It not only shows the need for using simulation for better production planning and layout-decisions during execution to improve productivity, but also compares these Softwares, in order to help Simulation practitioners to make informed decisions on software selection based on the mentioned parameters for comparison.