  The poultry processing industry struggles to keep up with new developments in
meat consumption and livestock breeding. Designing poultry processing systems
is becoming increasingly more complex, and an increasing number of iterations
of (re)design are required to optimize the product flow in these systems. To
address this issue, this study presents a discrete-event simulation-based
method for design space exploration of production systems. This method is
mostly automated, greatly reducing the time and effort required in the design
process. The steps that are automated are iterating on the design, model
construction, performing simulation experiments, and interpreting the
simulation results. An industrial case study in which a poultry processing
system is redesigned is used to validate the effectiveness of the proposed
method. A detailed description of this case study is given to showcase the
different ways in which this design space exploration method can be used.
