Designing a resilient production system with reconfigurable machines and movable buffers

Abstract

The resilience of a production system is determined by its capability to respond to internal breakdowns and/or external disruptions and recover. In conventional production systems, internal disruptions such as machine breakdown are handled by parallel stations and storage buffers, which come at a cost. In this paper, we propose to use reconfigurable machines (RMs) and movable buffers (MBs) to increase the resilience of a production system. The production system is modelled using a modified Markov chain model. To reduce the computational effort, an iterative method is adopted for the production lines that have many RMs and MBs. The resilience of the production system is evaluated by a combination of production loss, steady production rate with threshold, work-in-process in Idle-area of MBs, process time of work-in-process in Idle-area of MB with threshold, and investment return. Two production systems are analysed, one with 3 operations and the other with 10 operations. The computer simulation results indicate that the resilience of a production system can be improved by more than 9% by RMs and MBs. Finally, a set of guidelines for design production systems with RMs and MBs are also given.