Reliability and availability measure and assessment of multistage production systems

Abstract

This paper investigates an interesting research topic of defining and measuring reliability and availability of multistage production systems. Most current production systems include multiple stations or stages with possible varying buffer capacity in each station. The configurations of buffer resources/equipment and their reliability performance in one station are interdependent with adjacent stations, which makes it challenging to define and measure the reliability and availability of the overall system. Stochastic processes such as Markov process is introduced to model the reliability and availability performance of multistage production systems. The relationship of reliability/availability and the traditional performance metrics such as cycle times and throughputs in modeling production systems are investigated. Simulation models are introduced to verify performance of the proposed methods under complex and varying multistage production settings.