Track: Engineering Education

Abstract

This study presents a learning framework for manufacturing paradigms utilizing both physical and computer simulations. The objective of this study is to attract more people to manufacturing and address the problem of lacking young talents in the field. First, physical simulations of the five manufacturing paradigms (i.e., craft production, mass production, Lean production, mass customization, and personalized production) are developed in order to understand the past, present and future of manufacturing and identify the associated skill sets. Then computer simulations are developed to imitate the physical experiments. The developed simulation will be used to teach high school students the basics of manufacturing and how simulation can be used to perform analysis of manufacturing systems. Preliminary results are discussed and suggestions for future work are presented.