This is tickling my curiosity... Anyone knows if Factorio is time-accurate and could be used for production line design/balancing? Is it implementing things like locks on shared resources (e.g. operators), and random stoppages? That would be fun to introduce it in corporate environment.
>things like locks on shared resources (e.g. operators), and random stoppages?
Not natively, but the game gives you a lot of tools. You could probably add some of those things with circuits (the "Factorio redstone"), or with a little more effort writing a mod.
The game is hard deterministic (so that multiplayer works) despite having plenty of multithreaded optimizations. You could probably do something with it. Although that may raise some eyebrows.
It’s very good at modeling real world distributed systems problems and solutions, so it would not surprise me to find applications to production line design. For instance a very basic realization is that the typical throughput/latency tradeoffs have to be made.
That's effectively the question: what is the buffer size needed to insulate two unit operations without introducing penalizing ramp up and ramp down phases. If one could get such answers from Factorio that would be very funny for the 10-20k dedicated software packages.
I think that would be trivial to model in Factorio. Honestly every factory beyond beginner size is dealing with that, not always in a principled way of course.
Personally I find the new DLC with compact design on space platforms to be really fun that way. Back pressure has been a necessary mechanism to create to prevent all sorts of deadlocks for instance.
