AVAILABILITY RELIABILITY ENGINEERING ANALYSIS OF 3-STAGE, 4-STAGE, AND 5-STAGE UNRELIABLE SERIES TRANSFER LINES

Series transfer lines provide the modern manufacturing facility with a n orderly and efficient method of product assembly. Sequential tasks a re assigned to specific workstations along the line. Buffers between t he workstations provide on-line inventories to regulate product flow a long the line. Previous reliability or availability analysis of these lines employed continuous-time Markov chain models. The analysis here focuses on recent developments in discrete-time Markov modeling of lin es with unreliable workstations and nonfailing buffers. Specifically t his paper demonstrates a more stable and efficient computation of stat ionary-state workstation buffer model probabilities for unreliable lin es. In addition, a highly efficient algorithm was developed to isolate and remove transient states from the model. Finally, a regression ana lysis linear model was developed to predict the effects of changing in dividual workstation availabilities and buffer capacities on overall l ine availability.