Modeling and Simulation of 500 mL Packaged Drinking Water Packaging Line

Abstract

Packaged drinking water plants depend on synchronized filling, capping, date coding, labelling, and shrink-  wrapping operations to maintain production rate, product quality, and dispatch readiness. This study presents a case-based discrete-event simulation and virtual commissioning study of the 500 mL packaged drinking water packaging section at Tashi Beverages Limited, Bhutan. Operational data collected from the plant, including station processing times, weekly downtime estimates, rework assumptions, production target, rated capacity, buffer capacity, and effective operating time, were used to parameterize a Siemens Tecnomatix Plant Simulation model. The model was validated using a plant-derived benchmark range of 920 to 1150 cases over a 7.67-hour reduced simulation window. Ten baseline replications produced a mean throughput of 1028.4 cases, a standard deviation of 77.84 cases, a coefficient of variation of 7.57%, and a relative precision of 5.41%. Simulation experiments showed that increasing buffer capacity from 1 to 500 bottles produced only about 1.5% throughput improvement and was not statistically significant, whereas reducing the processing time of the filler, sealer, and date coder gave a much stronger improvement up to a practical threshold region of 0.75- 0.67 s/bottle. PLC logic was developed in Siemens TIA Portal using a finite-state-machine concept, and a PC-based HMI/SCADA-oriented interface was developed in WinCC Runtime Advanced for overview monitoring, alarms, trends, reporting, and data logging. The TPS model was then linked with the PLC logic through S7-PLCSIM Advanced to demonstrate a virtual commissioning testbed. The work is presented as a plant-specific engineering study and digital-twin oriented prototype, not as a complete industrial digital twin or fully validated plant deployment.