TAF PUBLISHING

Today manufacturing systems are highly automated and consist of several interlinked machines. These automated lines are subject to frequent failures, which affect system reliability and availability, as well as its productivity. In operation of such lines, it is necessary to have enough information on failure and repair data in order to be able to analyze system reliability and availability so that exact output rates could be estimated. Reliability also depends on the preventive maintenance operations. Therefore, it is also desirable to have appropriate analysis in order to see the effects of preventive maintenances on system availability. This paper presents a procedure for collecting appropriate data, analyzing it, and determining system reliability, availability, and productivity of manufacturing lines. Furthermore, procedures and models are presented to study the effects of preventive maintenances on system availability. A special case example is used to illustrate the analysis in detail. The procedures and the models presented in this paper should be useful for operations engineers in order to improve the productivity of their manufacturing lines.