Bill Gradwohl wrote:
I'm looking for an application, hopefully under Linux, to model an industrial process. If I knew what something like this was called, I could Google for it, but I know of no name for it.
Extremely trivial example: Drill Press time 5 minutes - consumes D kwh of electricity. Leads to: CNC machine time 60 minutes - consumes C kwh of electricity. Leads to: Anealing oven time 30 minutes - Consumes A kwh of eletricity.
I'd like to feed the app resources, characteristics of those resources, and then plug in production figures over a time period and have it tell me how many Drill Presses, etc I need to get that production, how much energy is consumed to add to cost of goods, etc.
Largely this is a complex scheduling problem. The app should also highlight resource shortages to say that certain things are impossible due to not enough whatever, and lay out a time line for when things need to happen.
Any one know what this might be called, and where I might find such an app?
I think you've got it -- process modeling. Here's what I found on Google:
http://directory.google.com/Top/Computers/Software/Manufacturing/Process/
I used some about a decade ago, both on Macs and PCs. I doubt you'll find something on Linux for free because it is not easy software to use effectively. Though, I remember the Mac software being fun.
I've looked for Design of Experiments software -- sort of related -- and not found much on Linux.
Take care,
Kurt Hansen khansen@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
