Analysis and design of discrete part production lines (Q1022025)

Automation in manufacturing has become an important factor in order to increase the traditionally conflicting objectives flexibility and productivity. Flexibility addresses the problem of producing a number of distinct orders in a flow line environment with respect to different production alternatives and in order to meet some objectives. Productivity refers to high speed production, high machine utilization, and small storage requirements. This book provides the reader with models and solutions to problems of server, workload and buffer allocation. Chapter 1 contains an overview on manufacturing systems, different types, modeling, and significant changes over the last 50 years. As a result, the increased progress in information technology became an important issue to control the flow of orders in a factory. A classification of manufacturing systems, methods of analysis and measures of performance are introduced. Chapter 2 is dedicated to discrete part production lines. The production line consists of work stations where jobs are required to pass once through each station in the same order. Buffers have a limited capacity, processing times and work stations' failure and repair are random. Among the performance measures throughput is considered to be the most important one. The first part is a Markovian analysis of the flow line using the queuing system structure of production lines. Later on large production lines are decomposed into smaller systems with a suitable connection in order to approximate the behavior of the large line. Other approximation methods, i.e. the expansion method and aggregation, are explained. Towards the end of this chapter production lines with parallel machines at each work station are discussed, which are necessary to avoid starving of downstream stations. Simulation models conclude this chapter. The short chapter 3 discusses the design of production lines while chapter 4 is on the workload allocation and the server allocation problem. While the former problem is the assignment of work to the stations the latter is the assignment of service to certain stations. Chapter 5, the buffer allocation problem, answers the question how to allocate a number of buffers between the stations in order to optimize certain objectives. Chapter 6 is on the simultaneous allocation of workload, servers and buffers. The book concludes with some cost considerations, an appendix on basics in mathematics and queuing theory, as well as another appendix on reference details of the introduced algorithms, a glossary, surprisingly a list of conference participants of a series of five conferences in Greece and a last appendix with screenshots of a simulation model of a production line. Every chapter concludes with a list of relevant references. This book is a comprehensive approach on flow lines' uncertainties. The book is equally interesting for use in university courses as well as for practitioners. I am not aware of many other books covering such a huge variety of practically relevant aspects and quantitative models on production lines on a limited number of pages.