Industries, such as automotive, heavily rely on an accurate representation of breakdown profiles of their machinery.

SIMUL8 offers a wealth of options for modeling breakdowns, which allow your simulation to act like your real life process. You can access to the breakdown features in both the Activity and Resource objects.  In an Activity just click on efficiency (on the properties tab) and for a Resource click on absence (on the additional tab) and you will open the breakdowns dialog.

The default option is to let SIMUL8 decide on breaking down objects based on the percentage of uptime you specify, and you can also add your average repair time to this.

However if you know more detailed information about the occurrences of breakdowns you can add this and create profiles unique to your processes. Simply click ‘detailed’ and it will open the ‘Time between breakdowns’ dialog:

Here you can select the distribution and parameters that apply to your equipment. Additionally, you can change between Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF) and Mean Cycles Between Failures (MCBF). If you have more than one break down type you can click on the ‘More’ button on the Efficiency dialog to create multiple profiles (e.g. electrical break downs, mechanical break downs, etc.):

This allows you to create as many breakdown profiles as you need, and therefore allow you to simulate your system accurately.

Found this tip useful? – Check out our whitepaper ‘Breakdowns Happen: How to Factor Downtime into your Simulation’

If you’ve found this tip useful then you might be interested in reading our latest whitepaper by simulation expert Brian Harrington where he explains the key learning points that you should consider when working with downtime in your simulations based on his experience at Ford Motor Company. You can download the whitepaper here >