System Reliability and Decision Making for a Production System with Intersectional Lines

Abstract

A three-phase procedure is proposed to measure the performance of a production system with intersectional lines by taking reworking actions into account. In particular, for a production system with intersectional lines, common station shares its capacity to all lines when processing. Hence, it is important to analyze the capacity of the common station while performance evaluation. This study addresses the system reliability as a key performance indicator to evaluate the probability of demand satisfaction. First, the production system is constructed as a production network (PN) by the graphical transformation and decomposition. Second, capacity analysis of all stations is implemented to determine the input flow of each station based on the constructed PN. Third, a simple algorithm is proposed to generate all minimal capacity vectors that stations should provide to satisfy the given demand. We evaluate the system reliability in terms of such minimal capacity vectors. A further decision making issue is discussed to decide a reliable production policy.