Throughput Assessment of Manufacturing Cells Subject to Random Disturbances

Performance analysis of Cellular manufacturing systems (CMS) can help companies finding the strengths and weaknesses of production processes. However, the emphasis has been on issues like cell formation, layout design and scheduling optimization without considering the effect of random disturbances on the performance of these systems. In this paper, we propose analytical models to assess the efficiency and the throughput of manufacturing cells subject to random breakdowns and repairs, scrapped and reworked parts. Simulation models imitating the real stochastic behavior of these production systems are developed in order to confirm the exactness of the proposed analytical formulations.