This work was carried out with the objective of developing a computational model using the simulation language EXTEND TM to simulate the dynamic of poultry slaughter industry and conduct sensitivity analysis experiments. Hence, a dynamic, stochastic, discrete model was developed. The modeled real system is located in the southwestern region of the Paraná State, Brazil, which has a daily slaughter capacity of 500000 poultries using three processing lines and operating in three daily schedules. To validate the model data from three schedules were collected and compared to the output variables from the real system generated by the model; those variables were: (i) processing time; (ii) gross weight; (iii) live weight; (iv) sub-product weight; (v) total production weight; (vi) whole slaughtered weight; and (vii) net weight. The model implemented proved to be efficient since the percentage of average errors was less than 1.13%. The sensitivity analysis carried out, with processing rates changed to 7000; 8000 and 9000 poultries per hour per line, showed the following processing time averages 8.69, 7.86 and 7.86 hours, respectively. In addition, the experiment demonstrated that the processing rate of 9000 poultries h-1 does not imply directly a reduction of the processing time since the rate of poultry arriving at the slaughterhouse can be related to idle periods at poultry slaughter facility.
meat; slaughter industry; operations researches
