What this is
start hereA working model of a container glass manufacturer — 4 plants, 8 furnaces, 18 forming lines — with one operations platform running on top of it. The plant is simulated and runs continuously. Every screen reads the same world, at the same instant.
It is built to be read two ways. If you have run a glass plant, the physics is the point: pull, cullet, cavity losses, forming ramps and the cost of a job change are all modelled rather than decorated. If you have not, nothing below assumes you have — the plant is explained in order, and the glossary at the bottom decodes anything on any screen.
How glass gets made
follow it in order — each step opens the screen that covers itFurnace
The mix melts at about 1,590 °C and comes out as a continuous river of glass. It never stops — you cannot turn a furnace off for the weekend.
Furnaces & energy →Forehearth
A cooling channel that carries glass from the furnace to one machine and conditions it to forming temperature.
Plant floor →Forming
Blobs of glass are cut and dropped into moulds, then pressed and blown into bottles. Several containers at a time, several times a minute.
Plant floor →Lehr
A long oven that cools the ware slowly so it does not shatter. It takes about an hour, which is why a forming fault is found an hour after it started.
Cold end & quality →Warehouse
Pallets wait for a truck. Glass is bulky and cheap, so stock builds fast and costs real money to hold.
Network & stock →Customer
Breweries and food producers, ordering by the truckload against a forecast that moves.
Planning →
The furnace running whether or not anyone is drawing from it is the single fact the whole thing turns on. A line that stops does not save glass — it converts it to cullet at full rate, and that shows up on the plant floor within the hour.
Where to start
by the job you would be doingProduction planner
“What should each line run next, and what does changing it cost?”
Whoever has to connect it
“What does this own, what does it read, and what happens when a system is down?”
What sits underneath
the same data, read four other waysThe whole network as one picture — plant, furnace, line, hot end and cold end, rolled up the way the plant is actually built.
A model trained on the running plant that predicts what each line should be doing, so the gap between expected and actual is the thing you look at.
Standing checks that watch for conditions a person would miss. They raise things; they do not decide them.
Plain questions against the same numbers, answered with the working shown.
Glossary
every term used on any screen- PTP
- Pack to pull. Of all the glass the furnace melted, the share that left as saleable product. The number the plant is run on.
- Pull
- How much glass a furnace melts, in tonnes per day.
- Cullet
- Broken or recycled glass. Some is bought in and melted deliberately; the rest is your own losses going back round.
- Cullet chute
- Where glass goes when no machine takes it. A stopped line does not stop the furnace — the glass keeps coming and goes straight to the chute.
- Gob
- The measured blob of molten glass cut and dropped into the mould. Its weight sets the bottle's weight.
- 10 × 4 QG
- Ten sections, four gobs — a machine with ten forming stations each making four containers per cycle. QG is quad gob; TG triple, DG double.
- Section
- One forming station on the machine. They run in sequence and can be shut off individually, which is why a machine can be part-down and still running.
- Cavity
- One mould position. A cavity down is lost output that no one else makes up.
- NNPB
- Narrow neck press and blow. A forming process that makes lighter bottles than blow and blow, and is fussier to run.
- Lehr
- The annealing oven after forming. Cools ware slowly so it does not carry stress.
- Job change
- Switching a line to a different product. Moulds come out, moulds go in, and the line spends hours climbing back to speed.
- Article / SKU
- One product — a specific bottle in a specific colour at a specific weight.
- Forehearth
- The channel from furnace to machine. It is what couples the two, and it is where colour can be changed without changing the furnace.
- Flint / amber / green
- Clear, brown and green glass. A furnace makes one colour for its whole campaign, which can be a decade.
- Campaign
- The life of a furnace between rebuilds, usually ten to fifteen years.
- SEC
- Specific energy consumption — gigajoules of energy per tonne of glass melted.
- Hold
- A batch stopped from shipping pending a decision. Software can raise one automatically; only a person can release it.
- B-double
- An Australian truck configuration. The unit plants actually count despatch in.
Bottler Glass Co. is fictional and every number here is simulated. The process, the constraints and the costs are not — they are modelled from how container glass plants actually run, and the assumptions are all in one file (src/sim/constants.ts) so they can be argued with.