SENSITIVITY ANALYSIS OF MACHINE INTERFERENCE IN MANUFACTURING SYSTEMS

A class of manufacturing systems is presented in which the machine int erference problem plays an important role in production. We consider a single server (robot) in addition to two types of random machine stop pages with priorities. A detailed analysis has been focused on two mea sures: robot utilization and machine efficiency. It has been shown tha t one has to make a compromise between the above two sensitive measure s. We have further computed the optimum number of machines that can be served by a robot. A novel optimization technique is used to fulfill this requirement. The simulation results reveal that the number of mac hines as well as the service rate can be utilized as decision variable s in the problem at hand. Copyright (C) 1996 Elsevier Science Ltd