Reducing energy consumption in serial production lines with Bernoulli reliability machines

Abstract

This paper is devoted to developing an integrated model to minimise energy consumption while maintaining desired productivity in Bernoulli serial lines with unreliable machines and finite buffers. For small systems, such as three- and four-machine lines with small buffers, exact analysis to optimally allocate production capacity is introduced. For medium size systems (e.g. three- and four-machine lines with larger buffers, or five-machine lines with small buffers), an aggregation procedure to evaluate line production rate is introduced. Using it, optimal allocation of machine efficiency is searched to minimise energy consumption. Insights and allocation principles are obtained through the analyses. Finally, for larger systems, a fast and accurate heuristic algorithm is presented and validated through extensive numerical experiments to obtain optimal allocation of production capacity to minimise energy consumption while maintaining desired productivity.

Keywords:

• serial line
• Bernoulli reliability model
• energy efficient manufacturing
• key performance indicator
• probabilistic models
• stochastic models
• production modelling
• reliability engineering

Notes

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work is supported in part by NSF [grant number CMMI-106365]; NIST [grant number 70NANB14H260]; National Science Foundation of China (NSFC) [grant number 71501109].