Nov 23, 2020
The Power of Artificial Intelligence
The Engineering team, together with partners Pathmind and The AnyLogic Company, has recently delivered an innovative Machine Learning project leveraging advanced simulation modeling and Artificial Intelligence technologies. A global manufacturing leader, the customer's initiative aimed to successfully apply reinforcement learning in order to intelligently route heavy industrial parts over a complex assembly line in a factory. Reinforcement learning was able to solve the manufacturing optimization problem, minimizing factory flow bottlenecks, and discovering paths that reduced unnecessary moves on the line by 11% while increasing the number of coordinated moving parts by 66%.
The Customer’s Challenge
When it comes to Aerospace & Defense or Automotive Manufacturing, heavy parts that require multiple complex manufacturing processes, such as engines and turbines, can make it difficult for factories to allocate machine resources as each part moves down the line, and time their movements in coordination. And just like our customer’s team prior to this project, production line managers often consider each individual production cycle manually.
About the Solution
Many factories today attempt to formalize the knowledge of experts with custom heuristics that involve thousands of lines of code. But those expert systems are cumbersome and hard to adapt when data changes. Often, the domain expertise of decades is implemented in brittle systems that are equally hard to adapt or replace. But reinforcement learning has shown that it is able to learn complex sequential decision-making protocols when trained on a valid simulation.
The factory owner needed a more adaptable system that was capable of responding to changes in data, while also moving heavy parts through its manufacturing processes more quickly. Our customer needed to increase throughput within a more robust decision-making system, which is where Pathmind and AnyLogic came in.
About the Results
Engineering Group’s team developed and implemented a reinforcement learning policy with Pathmind that was able to simulate and control the movement of heavy objects in a factory. The advanced policy, now implemented, coordinates movement of heavy objects on the assembly line more efficiently than any previous heuristic.
The average number of moves required to complete processing of all components in the factory was decreased by 11% — from 79 moves to 70 moves — when compared to the best previous heuristic. Additionally, the intelligent policy coordinates the movement of 66% more objects in the factory — 10 components vs. 6 components — than the best previous heuristic. The results are an increase in manufacturing throughput and a decrease in cost associated with moving objects.
Pathmind: Why Artificial Intelligence?
A partner of Engineering Group, Pathmind was founded on the belief that Artificial Intelligence, or AI, can benefit society by helping businesses facing deep economic change to build resilient supply chains. Pathmind helps simulation modelers optimize supply chains and industrial control systems using AI. Pathmind’s reinforcement learning policies are easy to integrate into larger software solutions, so that they can be used to improve the operations of real-world business processes across energy, logistics, manufacturing and supply chain systems. Many of the world’s top simulation consultancies and corporate industrial engineering teams, including Engineering Group and our customers, look to Pathmind for exploring the impact of new strategies in complex situations.
The AnyLogic Company: Why Simulation Modeling?
A multinational company operating from the U.S. and Europe, The AnyLogic Company designs, develops, and markets best-in-class simulation software for different business and industry applications. Their flagship product, AnyLogic, is the standard in multi-method modeling technology, delivering increased efficiency and less risk when tackling complex business challenges. AnyLogic software is utilized world-wide in thousands of commercial organizations and academic institutions, and in over 40% of Fortune 100 companies. As a leader in industrial simulation and data analytics, Engineering Group is a proud partner of The AnyLogic Company.
