The Role of Object Oriented CAD in a Generic Simulator for the Industrialized Housing Industry

This paper describes a simulator- based decision support tool for manufactures of prefabricated homebuilding components. The Generic Industrialized Housing Manufacturing Simulator (GIHMS) serves as an experimental factory, capable of simulating factory performance under various product design, factory design, and operations management scenarios. GIHMS’ unique strength lies in its user-friendly WINDOWS-based “point-and-click” user interface. The interface allows the user to configure a factory and specify products for production without programming in a simulation language. The heart of the user interface is a specialized object oriented CAD system. This paper describes the GIHMS structure, focussing on the specialized CAD system, and demonstrates its functionality by describing the factory modelling process.