Proceedings of the 2014 Winter Simulation Conference A. Tolk, S. Y. Diallo, I. O. Ryzhov, L. Yilmaz, S. Buckley, and J. A. Miller, eds. OPTIMIZING THE DESIGN AND OPERATION OF A BEER PACKAGING LINE THROUGH AN ADVANCED SIMIO-BASED DES TOOL Natalia P. Basán Mariana E. Cóccola Carlos A. Méndez INTEC (UNL-CONICET) Güemes 3450 Santa Fe, 3000, ARGENTINA ABSTRACT Discrete event simulation (DES) techniques cover a broad collection of methods and applications that allows imitating, assessing, predicting and enhancing the behavior of large and complex real-world processes. This work introduces a modern DES framework, developed with SIMIO simulation software, to optimize both the design and operation of a complex beer packaging system. The proposed simulation model provides a 3D user-friendly graphical interface which allows evaluating the dynamic operation of the system over time. In turn, the simulation model has been used to perform a comprehensive sensitive analysis over the main process variables. In this way, several alternative scenarios have been assessed in order to achieve remarkable performance improvements. Alternative heuristics and optimization by simulation can be easily embedded into the proposed simulation environment. Numerical results generated by the DES model clearly show that production and efficiency can be significantly enhanced when the packaging line is properly set up. 1 INTRODUCTION In the current context of increasingly competitive markets, production activities must be properly accomplished in order to ensure high quality products. This often translates into a better product presentation, which needs to fit today’s market requirements. In this way, the demand growth and the trend to specialize the presentation of products are putting pressure on companies to perform more diversified tasks on their packaging lines, which have become more complex in the last years. This paper aims to analyze the operation of the main packaging line of an international beer company located in Argentina. The simulation study is mainly motivated by the low efficiency of the line, according to the level desired by the managers. This implies a reduction on the current production level due to the packaging process is an essential stage in the whole production process. The main objective of this work is to identify, analyze and reduce the causes affecting the productivity of the packaging line. Modern simulation techniques has recently emerged as proper tools to cope with complex decision making problems (Aguirre et al. 2008; Aguirre et al. 2011). Therefore, a comprehensive simulation-based model has been developed in order to determine the potential changes to improve the performance of the facility. The modern SIMIO modeling software was used for developing the simulation model. After model development and validation, different alternative scenarios (current, suggested and theoretical) were assessed in order to determine the more suitable line design and operation that allows increasing economical benefits. The manuscript is organized as follows. Section 2 describes the main features of the bottling beer process. Afterwards, in Section 3, an explanation of how the simulation model was developed is given. 1989 978-1-4799-7486-3/14/$31.00 ©2014 IEEE