# A Framework for 3D Plant Simulation of Meal-Kit-Packaging Robot Automation System
## 4 Discussion  
In the real world of individual meal kit packaging processes, the meal kit product is composed of a number of individual meal kit items such as sauce, vegetable, meat, noodle, etc. For each final meal kit product, the meal kit item size, type, number, and method of packaging is varied which makes the meal kit packaging process complex. Based on these high-variant parameters, the hybrid 3D simulation is required, while changing the manufacturing layout, to apply the robot automatic system in order to reduce the cost and time of optimizing a newly designed manufacturing layout. In addition, to achieve the number of products produced each day by workers by using the robot automation system, 3D simulation can give the output if the robot automation system is used to improve performance prior to the actual new equipment installation. For the simulation, the 3D scanning technique offers many advantages, including faster data acquisition, higher precision, non-contact measurement, reduced human error, and cost-effectiveness. These benefits make it particularly well-suited for capturing complex geometries and generating accurate 3D models efficiently, while also enhancing the reliability of the resulting models [25; 26]. In the manual process, the majority of workers (five out of eight) was involved in the meal kit components' insertion process in the try to achieve the target set for order-based production. The result of the 3D simulation showed that the average utilization rate of the manual packaging process was 56.58%. The relatively low utilization rate of manual \begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{c c c c} \hline \hline \multirow{2}{*}{**KPI Index**} & \multirow{2}{*}{**Manual**} & \multicolumn{3}{c}{**Robot Automation**} \\ \cline{3-4}  & & **Single Delta Robot** & **Double Delta Robot** \\ \hline Utilization rate (\%) & 64.8, 53.1, 53.1, 56.0, & 99.9 & 98.0, 78.5 \\ Throughput (ea/h) & 2112 & 1510 & 2568 \\ Number of employee & 8 & 2 & 2 \\
1 Cycle time (s) & - & 2.36 & 1.42, 1.03 \\ \hline \hline \end{tabular}
\end{table} 
Table 1: Overall 3D plant simulation performance of meal kit packaging process of manual vs. robot automation system. Figure 17: Representative throughput and cycle time result of double-delta-robot-implemented meal kit packaging process. work may be attributed to process inefficiencies caused by waiting times, worker fatigue, variability, and the burden of repetitive tasks. Thus, we considered replacing five workers in the most labor-intensive process with the single or double delta robot and five automatic individual components feeders. In addition, a pneumonia rotational gripper of the delta robot was designed that can pick various types of meal kit components. The throughput of the meal kit packaging process implemented with a single delta robot is only about 68.3% compared to that of manual work, even though it has a very high utilization rate of 99.9%. It was difficult for the single delta robot system to reach the throughput of the manual process due to the relatively long cycle time, as it had to sequentially pick and place three different components. Therefore, the single delta robot system requires more than two workers to improve the throughput. The throughput of the process implemented with the double delta robot was approximately 121.6% compared to the manual process, with utilization rates of 98.0% and 78.5%, respectively. The utilization rate and one cycle time of the delta robot #1 for gripping two components (source and power) were 98.0% and 1.42%. The robot #2, designed for gripping one component (noodle), showed a lower utilization rate and cycle time compared to robot #1, with 78.5% and 1.03 s, respectively. Thus, since all components are placed on the tray in a cycle of 1.42 s, with two robots, the cycle time can be approximately 1.66 times faster, and the throughput can be 1.7 times greater compared to using just one robot.