Reliability/Availability of Manufacturing cells and Transfer Lines

Abstract

One of the major wastes in a manufacturing system is downtime caused by machine breakdown/failure and the time and cost incurred to repair the failed machine. Machine breakdown leads to stoppage of production in manufacturing cells and automated serial production lines (Transfer lines) until the machine is brought back to operable condition. Obtaining the reliability/availability measures of machines in manufacturing systems is necessary to schedule preventive maintenance and periodic replacement of critical components in order to increase manufacturing uptime. To assess the reliability measures and availability of manufacturing cells and transfer lines, field failure data were collected from a crankshaft manufacturing cell and an automated transfer line and were fitted to relevant statistical distributions using Goodness of fit tests, and the necessary reliability and availability measures were obtained using Maximum likelihood estimation (MLE). The results were that the time between failures of CNC machines and Transfer Lines follows the Weibull distribution (in most cases) and Transfer Lines require higher maintenance requirements than manufacturing cells.