Abstract—This article presents a study in which an attempt has been made to figure out the optimal arrival parameters to reduce the cost of manufacturing submersible pumps. It mainly focuses on the idea to find the significance of arrival parameters such as entities per arrival, assembly batch size and inter arrival time on the response called cost of manufacturing. A proper combination of these factors must be established so as to get reduced manufacturing cost using the Taguchi method. The manufacturing cost for trial runswas obtained using ARENA simulation using data collection from a pump manufacturing industry. Mixed level design was considered with 4-level design for inter-arrival time and 2-level design for other two factors. Least manufacturing cost of INR 1046 was deduced with optimum combination of inter-arrival time of 5 min, entity per arrival of 1 and assembly batch size of 3. Another objective was to find significance of factors affecting the manufacturing cost. It was found that inter arrival time highly affects manufacturing cost. Thus significant factors along with their optimum combination were found using Taguchi techniques to arrive at the least manufacturing cost.

Index Terms—Taguchi, Optimization, ARENA, Manufacturing cost, Simulation

Cite: Vignesh Shanmugam Sankaran, Venkataramanan Segar, Balamurugan Subramanian, and Ashok Krishna, "Optimization of Manufacturing Process Parameters Using Arena Simulation and Taguchi Method," International Journal of Mechanical Engineering and Robotics Research, Vol. 4, No. 1, pp. 435-444, January 2015.