Lean buffering in serial production lines with non-exponential machines

Emre Enginarlar, Jingshan Li and Semyon M. Meerkov ()
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Emre Enginarlar: Los Alamos National Laboratory
Jingshan Li: GM Research and Development Center
Semyon M. Meerkov: University of Michigan

A chapter in Stochastic Modeling of Manufacturing Systems, 2006, pp 29-53 from Springer

Abstract: Abstract In this paper, lean buffering (i.e., the smallest level of buffering necessary and sufficient to ensure the desired production rate of a manufacturing system) is analyzed for the case of serial lines with machines having Weibull, gamma, and log-normal distributions of up- and downtime. The results obtained show that: (1) the lean level of buffering is not very sensitive to the type of up- and downtime distributions and depends mainly on their coefficients of variation, CV up and CV down; (2) the lean level of buffering is more sensitive to CV down than to CV up but the difference in sensitivities is not too large (typically, within 20%). Based on these observations, an empirical law for calculating the lean level of buffering as a function of machine efficiency, line efficiency, the number of machines in the system, and CV up and CV down is introduced. It leads to a reduction of lean buffering by a factor of up to 4, as compared with that calculated using the exponential assumption. It is conjectured that this empirical law holds for any unimodal distribution of up- and downtime, provided that CV up and CV down are less than 1.

Keywords: Lean production systems; Serial lines; Non-exponential machine reliability model; Coefficients of variation; Empirical law (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2006
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:sprchp:978-3-540-29057-5_2

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DOI: 10.1007/3-540-29057-5_2

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