INTEGRATION BETWEEN DISCRETE-EVENT SIMULATION AND THEORY OF CONSTRAINTS FOR CAPACITY ANALYSIS: AN AUTOMOTIVE CASE STUDY

In a context of growing industrial competitiveness and the need to adapt to demand variations, this study evaluates the capacity of an automotive production system to absorb an increase of approximately 95%, from 110,000 to 215,000 parts per month, through the integration between Discrete Event Simulation (SED) and Theory of Constraints (TOC). A computational model was developed and validated based on real data, allowing the analysis of different operational scenarios. The results indicate that, under the current conditions, the system operates close to the limit of its main constraint, with a processing time of up to 43 days for the new demand. The expansion of shifts, in isolation, proved to be insufficient. On the other hand, interventions aimed at the restrictive resource, combined with increased operational efficiency, reduced the time to approximately 30 days, making it possible to meet the demand. The study shows that improvements focused on the bottleneck can expand capacity without structural investments.