We are venturing into the realm of additive manufacturing (AM) where unlike traditional manufacturing, products can be customized or different products be created using the same equipment. 3D print farms are coming to existence where there is need to manage throughput similar to what you have described for creating software. Since AM deals with physical entities, what additional items would be needed to be considered to optimize flow?
Queuing network models are a useful tool for studying this from the perspective of reducing unnecessary delays from your process even in mixed environments. Software development is much harder to model accurately in this way because the “service operations” are very hard to measure accurately and we have to rely on proxies. In general, I think that the physical goods supply chain is simpler to model, though it too can behave like a complex system.
We are venturing into the realm of additive manufacturing (AM) where unlike traditional manufacturing, products can be customized or different products be created using the same equipment. 3D print farms are coming to existence where there is need to manage throughput similar to what you have described for creating software. Since AM deals with physical entities, what additional items would be needed to be considered to optimize flow?
Queuing network models are a useful tool for studying this from the perspective of reducing unnecessary delays from your process even in mixed environments. Software development is much harder to model accurately in this way because the “service operations” are very hard to measure accurately and we have to rely on proxies. In general, I think that the physical goods supply chain is simpler to model, though it too can behave like a complex system.