DESIGN OF DYNAMIC FACILITY LAYOUT AND VIRTUAL MONITORING SYSTEM FOR POUNDO YAM FLOUR PROCESSING PLANT

Abstract

There is an existing poundo yam flour process plant with a static layout; it has the capacity to produce 12.25kg of poundo yam flour in 315.04 minutes. The production capacity is limited due to the time expended at the parboiling and drying section of 77 minutes and 216 minutes respectively. The limitation has informed the need to design a dynamic facility layout to increase the production capacity, introduce some flexibility of material flow through the process plant, permit effective utilization of resources and manage effectively material flow through the process plant; and virtual monitoring system to model, simulate and validate the dynamism of material flow through the process plant. Based on the existing static layout, a model was formulated to create a premise to forecast material flow and process time above the frame of reference in the existing process plant. The dynamic facility layout was subsequently designed to minimize material handling cost and scale up the production capacity of the process plant at reduced production time. The model formulation coupled with the knowledge of the material flow through the existing process plant was used in the development of dynamic programming software called Poundosim Software to generate optimal machine configuration to populate the designed dynamic facility layout. The simulation software takes an input value which is the expected poundo yam flour output from the process plant to generate the optimal machine configuration by increasing the service points at the region of bottlenecks (the parboiling and drying section) within the weight constraint to avoid redundancy at the parboiling unit and cost constraint to ensure economic viability of the entire process plant by preventing unending increase of the service points at the region of bottlenecks. Upon input of values within the range of 12.25kg to 134.75kg at an increment of 12.25kg, there was a considerable decrease in the total process time at optimal machine configuration compared with the reference machine configuration. In view to validate the flexibility of material flow through the process plant, the optimal machine configuration generated by the Poundosim was modeled and simulated on Flexsim 7.74 within the range of 12.25kg to 49kg poundo yam flour per throughput production at an increment of 12.25kg and compared with the reference machine configuration of the existing process plant. It was observed that the optimal machine configuration reduced process time and permitted increase or decrease in throughput capacity consequently validating the dynamism of material flow through the process plant.