PERFORMANCE MODELING OF RMS IN MULTI-PRODUCT ENVIRONMENT

Abstract

The need for reconfigurable manufacturing systems is triggered by unforeseeable changes in the market, the increasing fi-equency of new products introductions, changes in the pails for existing products, large fluctuations in product demand and mix, changes in government regulations, and changes in the process technology. These changes are driven by the global aggressive economic competition, educated and demanding customers. To remain competent in this new manufacturing environment, companies must be able to respond quickly and cost effectively to changes. This dissertation focuses on the study of the effects of configuration on the performance of a manufacturing system in multi-product environment in terms of throughput, queue length, server utilization, capacity scalability, convertibility and floor area. Four configurations with the same number and type of machines but different in the arrangements and connection with the material handling equipment have been considered for selecting the optimum machining system configuration. 10 This study met these research aims through an extensive study of relevant literature and the implementation of discrete event Simulation (DES) modelling using MATLAB (SimEvents) to evaluate the performance measures. Some hypothetical assumptions were taken as input for starting the models The findings from this study were: Queue length is lower for configurations having higher configuration width and crossover connections afler every stage, server utilization increases with increasing configuration width and crossover connections, throughput is higher for configurations with higher width, scalability of a system is zero for configurations having a serial connection in any of the stages and if addition of machines is required at those stages, convertibility is higher when the number of routing connection is more, i.e. when width of configuration and crossover connections are higher, convertibility is enhanced when the minimum number of replicated machines (configuration width) at a particular stage is higher. the degree of convertibility increases when the increment of conversion is minimum. The main conclusions drawn from this study were that in the design of new systems, r companies need to be concerned on future products, i.e. products throughout the life of the systems in addition to the products that are manufactured today. Though RMSs initial costs are higher, when the life time cost of the system is considered, is lower than the conventional manufacturing systems. Therefore, the development and implementation of RMS's technology is vital for manufacturing companies to compete and grow their market share in the current manufacturing environment. This study recommends that RMS as a new manufacturing system paradigm needs a lot of work to achieve the benefits that the conventional manufacturing systems could not provide. Therefore, the model would develop and give a complete picture of the systems if machine level reconfiguration, part quality and system reliability are considered for future study.