Throughput Model for Coupled Reconfigurable Product Line
Falah Hasan, P. K. Jain, K. Dinesh · 2012
In today's global manufacturing era, one of the important challenges faced by manufacturers is how to deal with stochastic demand and ever changing customer needs and requirements.Reconfigurable manufacturing systems are recognized as next generation manufacturing systems capable of meeting the above requirements economically by providing the exact functionality and capacity as and when required.Some core characteristics of these systems include scalability, convertibility, diagnosability and modularity.The design and operation of these systems are built around a part family.Though most the past research takes into account the optimization of some design parameter but still performance parameters like throughput or productivity, resource utilization, reliability and availability, needs to be investigated to evaluate performance of such systems.This chapter presents a mathematical model to evaluate the throughput or productivity of such systems.The developed model is employed to calculate throughput values for a 3station coupled reconfigurable product line.