Evaluate the Reliability of a seru Production System with Reworking Actions

ABSTRACT

This paper measures the reliability of a seru production system, which has been proven to be more flexible, efficient, and responsive than the traditional assembly lines in production practice. Seru is the Japanese pronunciation for “cell”, and it is a new type and flexible parallel low automated assembly mode originated from Japanese production practice. This is the first research that focuses on the evaluation of the reliability of seru production systems. We take into account reworking actions of some defective products, especially when these defective products have high values. In this seru production system, the capacity of each worker in the seru systems is regarded as stochastic according to the practical situation. The whole processes of each seru can be decomposed into a general process and a reworking process. In order to analyze the reliability of a seru production system, a model is constructed to describe these two process paths. A solution method is designed to obtain the seru production system reliability. Finally, some numerical examples are presented, and the reliability between seru production system and traditional assembly line is compared. We found that seru production systems are more reliable than assembly lines.

KEYWORDS:

• Seru
• reliability
• assembly line
• manufacturing systems
• reworking actions

Acknowledgments

This research was sponsored by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant nos. 71401075 and 71801129), the Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province (Grant no. BK20180452), and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (Grant no. 30920010021). We would like to extend our great appreciation to all the reviewers and editors who contributed to this research.

Disclosure of potential conflicts of interest

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [71401075, 71801129]; Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province [BK20180452]; Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities [30920010021]; MOE (Ministry of Education) Project of Humanities and Social Sciences [17YJA630058].