Learning through simulation

Middle management executives – such as factory forepersons – are increasingly having to assume responsibility for control processes. A new simulation program helps them assess the effects of their decisions and act sustainably.

Experience is an excellent teacher: What one tries out and experiences for oneself is usually more firmly retained in memory than what one has only read. The drawback of this method: The results often turn out differently than desired and, particularly where decisions in the daily industrial routine are concerned, the learning results often have to be paid for dearly – for example, when company executives make wrong decisions. Learning would be significantly more relaxed if employees were indeed able to try things out realistically but without any consequences at first.

Researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Factory Operation and Automation IFF in Magdeburg have developed such a system: The simulation program SimGiess teaches middle management executives to control production processes in a foundry according to aspects of sustainability. To do sod, they must initially make some decisions: Which employees with what qualifications will they assign to the job? Which energy supplier will they select? Which supplier will bring the sand required? The simulation program produces the cast parts virtually and incorporates the data specified, for instance the suppliers, in the process. Employees receive an analysis of their “production”, e.g. costs and environmental impact, in a spreadsheet or a diagram. “These results incorporate social aspects such as the impact on employee health, ecological aspects such as pollutants and economic aspects such as efficiency, costs and raw material consumption,” says IFF project manager Wilhelm Termath.

Yet what happens if certain employees are absent? Or a machine has ceased functioning, while a major customer desperately awaits a delivery? The program simulates such situations too. “Designing a realistic scenario was one of our challenges during development. On the one hand, we had to reproduce the complexity of the foundry process and, on the other hand, reduce the operation to be able to handle it technologically,” says Termath. SimGiess is already being used at the Lower Rhine Vocational Education Center in Duisburg/Essen to train factory forepersons.

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