Developments in the poultry processing industry, such as how livestock is raised and how consumers buy meat, make it increasingly difficult to design poultry processing systems that meet evolving standards. More and more iterations of (re)design are required to optimize the product flow in these systems. This paper presents a method for design space exploration of production systems using discrete-event simulation. This method automates most steps of design space exploration: iterating on the design, model construction, performing simulation experiments, and interpreting the simulation results. This greatly reduces the time and effort required to iterate through different designs. A case study is presented which shows that this method can be effective for design space exploration of poultry processing systems.