Effects of operating rates on the performance of manufacturing systems: A case study

This paper examines the operating rates loaded to a failure prone manufacturing system. The objective is to determine and compare the expected throughput of different operating rates. The failure times of different failure modes of manufacturing systems are assumed to be exponential. The performance measures discussed in the paper include availability, throughput and system effectiveness. A computer program, based on Markovian approach, has been developed to analyze different types of manufacturing systems, and to conduct a sensitivity analysis to the program output. The study is applied to an existing manufacturing system, using actual operation routings and machining times to evaluate the performance of different operation sequence and part loading. The results indicate that system performance is significantly affected by the operating rates loaded to the system.