Reliability modeling and analysis of serial-parallel hybrid multi-operational manufacturing system considering dimensional quality, tool degradation and system configuration

Machine configuration selection has a great impact oil the system-level reliability of a manufacturing system, while the absence of proper consideration of the product quality and the tool degradation on tool failure when determining the machine-level reliability is likely to result in unanticipated machine downtimes or inappropriate maintenance decisions. A generic methodology is thus developed to incorporate both the machine-level and the system-level reliability analyses. Firstly, the machine-level reliability is investigated based on the product dimensional quality and the tool degradation. A novel machine-level quality reliability-integrated model is developed to address the interaction between product quality and tool reliability. The developed machine-level reliability model is then used to estimate the system-level reliability for a manufacturing system with selected configurations. Various hybrid configurations of the multi-operational manufacturing system are investigated in terms of the system-level reliability. The analytical procedure and the effectiveness of the proposed methodology are demonstrated through an example of a serial-parallel hybrid system for cylinder head gasket machining. (C) 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.