Identifying bottlenecks in manufacturing systems using stochastic criticality analysis

J.P. Nogueira Bastos, L.J. van der Sanden, O. Donk, J.P.M. Voeten, S. Stuijk, R.R.H. Schiffelers, H. Corporaal

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionAcademicpeer-review

4 Citations (Scopus)
1 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

System design is a difficult process with many design-choices for which the impact may be difficult to foresee. Manufacturing system design is no exception to this. Increased use of flexible manufacturing systems which are able to perform different operations/use-cases further raises the design complexity. One important criterion to consider is the overall makespan and associated critical path for the different use-cases of the system. Stochastic critical path analysis plays a fundamental role in providing useful feedback for system designers to evaluate alternative specifications, which traditional fixed-time analysis cannot. In this paper, we extend our formal model-based framework, for the specification and design of manufacturing systems, with stochastic analysis abilities by associating a criticality index to each action performed by the system. This index can then be visualized and used within the framework such that a system designer can make better informed decisions. We propose a Monte-Carlo method as an estimation algorithm and we explicitly define and use confidence intervals to achieve an acceptable estimation error. We further demonstrate the use of the extended framework and stochastic analysis with an example manufacturing system.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationFDL 2017 - Proceedings of the 2017 Forum on Specification and Design Languages
Place of PublicationPiscataway
PublisherIEEE Computer Society
Pages1-8
Number of pages8
Volume2017-September
ISBN (Electronic)978-1-5386-4733-2
ISBN (Print)978-1-5386-1152-4
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 27 Feb 2018
Event2017 Forum on Specification and Design Languages (FDL 2017) - Verona, Italy
Duration: 18 Sept 201720 Sept 2017

Conference

Conference2017 Forum on Specification and Design Languages (FDL 2017)
Country/TerritoryItaly
CityVerona
Period18/09/1720/09/17

Keywords

  • Bottleneck identification
  • Criticality analysis
  • Formal specification
  • Manufacturing systems

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