Title: An approach to assess robustness of a reconfigurable manufacturing system

Authors: Ateekh Ur Rehman

Addresses: Department of Industrial Engineering, College of Engineering, Raytheon Chair for Systems Engineering (RCSE Chair), King Saud University, P.O. Box 800, Riyadh 11421, Saudi Arabia

Abstract: A manufacturing system is considered, which produces 30 products using 17 conventional machines and different process plans for each product. The system accepts customer orders for any combination of these products. These orders received from time to time may relate to different combinations of the products of varying quantities. The system is simulated using ProModel and the exercise helped in quantifying how the manufacturing system would perform under different scenarios characterised by the combinations of various operational features. The performance of the system is measured using performance measures such as machine utilisation, throughput time, product earliness, product lateness and product block time. Nine different alternative configurations were developed and simulated. Taguchi analysis led to some interesting inference, which appears to be extending good support to manufacturing system performance analysis. The details of the simulation model, analysis of the results and the inference drawn are presented in this paper.

Keywords: performance evaluation; reconfiguration; simulation; ProModel; robustness; signal to noise.

DOI: 10.1504/IJISE.2019.104277

International Journal of Industrial and Systems Engineering, 2019 Vol.33 No.4, pp.542 - 557

Received: 30 Dec 2017
Accepted: 07 Apr 2018
Published online: 24 Dec 2019 *

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