Product Sequencing With Respect to Quality in Flexible Manufacturing Systems With Batch Operations

Abstract--In many flexible manufacturing systems, batch production is often adopted to improve product quality. For example, in automotive paint shops, vehicles with same colors are typically grouped into small batches to reduce quality degradation and purge cost due to color change. In this paper, we present an analytical method to evaluate the quality performance of flexible manufacturing systems with batch operations. In addition, we investigate the impact of product sequencing and batch policies on product quality and present some insights to achieve better quality using these policies. Note to Practitioners--To improve product quality and reduce cost, batch production is often implemented in many flexible manufacturing systems. However, the current literature does not provide any method to analyze the quality performance in a flexible manufacturing system with batch production. Moreover, in such systems, different product sequencing and batch policies may result in different quali...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: TASE
• Authors: Junwen Wang, Jingshan Li, Jorge Arinez, Stephan Biller
• Keywords: Batch Production, Flexible Manufacturing Systems, Product Quality, Software Engineering, TASE 2010