Title: Redundancy optimisation for tandem production systems under queueing and availability constraints

Authors: Fong-Fan Wang

Addresses: Department of Industrial Engineering and Management, Hsiuping University of Science and Technology, Taichung 41280, Taiwan

Abstract: Equipment selection is an important issue during the initial phases of implementing a production system. In this paper, one type of product manufactured on a production line composed of several stages with redundant and unreliable machines is studied. Assume available version of machines with respective cost and operating characteristics are available for each subsystem, the objective is to minimise the purchase cost subject to average system availability and total waiting time constraints. We propose two techniques for evaluating the studied system. Using simulation, we justify that matrix analytical method can approximate the system behaviour better than another method based on Allen-Cunneen approximation. We employ three meta-heuristics, including genetic algorithm, particle swarm optimisation and simulated annealing to optimise the system structure. We provide numerical examples for performance evaluation and comparison of the efficiency and efficacy of the proposed optimisation methods.

Keywords: tandem production system; redundancy optimisation; matrix analytical method; metaheuristics.

DOI: 10.1504/IJOR.2024.136549

International Journal of Operational Research, 2024 Vol.49 No.2, pp.265 - 284

Received: 24 Mar 2021
Accepted: 22 May 2021
Published online: 07 Feb 2024 *

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