Discrete-event simulation model for offsite manufacturing in Australia

Offsite Manufacturing (OSM) has potential capabilities to enhance the Australian affordable housing supply. However, OSM supply chain requires effective management between two concurrent working sites: (1) offsite factory; and (2) building site. This means that information and material flows are necessary components for managing OSM supply chain. Nevertheless, the OSM supply chain is influenced by a number of major challenges such as broken junction between offsite and onsite, jumbled onsite process and vague customer demands. To overcome these challenges, this paper developed a Discrete-Event Simulation (DES) model for OSM in Australia. The Arena® software is designed to model manufacturing and construction processes to support a high level of analysis. Arena® provides advanced capabilities to mimic the behaviour of real system entities, layout and flow logic, as well as to produce data distributions and confidence intervals for the performance measures. The actual data was collected using interview with four OSM builders in Australia. The simulation model assist to evaluate three OSM scenarios (as-is, what-if I and what-if II) with different house order information intervention to the OSM supply chain. The simulation results indicated noteworthy improvements in the house completion time. Some limitations are acknowledged as the study reports on the findings using just limited interviews. Secondly, the model was developed and tested within Australia only; as such future studies could be employ case studies and further be conducted in other countries to enhance the generalisation of the findings. Currently, there are limited studies which seek to investigate the potential of DES within the housing supply chain management. In order to address this gap, this paper contributes by developing a DES for addressing challenges associated with the supply chain within the Australian housing sector.