Enhancing reliability of a continuous manufacturing system using wip buffers

Abstract

Continuous Manufacturing System (CMS), usually employed for mass production, has a serial line arrangement of different machines. These are arranged in sequence of operations to produce a specified product. In such CMS, over long period of usage, the production rate comes down, due to failures of machines in the line. Thus, reliability i.e. probability that such a CMS will give rated production over a year reduces considerably. To compensate for such loss of production, introduction of redundant parallel standby machines approach has been hypothesized and is in use irrespective of cost involved. A new approach of introducing buffers of Work-in-Progress (WIP) at various stages in the line, in place of standby redundant machines, has been proposed and its effect on the reliability of CMS to give rated production is analyzed. The results show that by using the proposed system/approach, the reliability that such a CMS will give rated production, is 100 %.