Performance indicator for a stochastic-flow manufacturing network with reworking actions based on reliability

Abstract

This paper studies the performance evaluation for a manufacturing system considering reworking actions from the industrial engineering perspective. Due to failure, partial failure, and maintenance, the capacity of each machine in a manufacturing system is stochastic. Therefore, a manufacturing system can be constructed as a stochastic-flow network, namelystochastic-flow manufacturing network (SFMN) herein. To evaluate the capability of an SFMN with reworking actions, we measure the probability that the SFMN satisfiesdemand and such a probability is referred to as the system reliability. First, a decomposition method is proposed to decompose the SFMN into one general processing path and several reworking paths. Subsequently, two algorithms are designed for different network models to generate the lower boundary vector of machine's capacity for guaranteeing that the SFMN producessufficient products. The system reliability of SFMN is derived in terms of such a vector afterwards.According to the system reliability, the production manager may plan and adjust the production capacity in a flexible competing environment as customers' demand change.