Energy-efficient buffer allocation problem in unreliable production lines

Abstract

The buffer allocation problem (BAP) is one of the major optimization problems considered by production systems designers. The BAP is widely studied in the literature, since buffers have a great impact on improving the efficiency of production systems especially for mass production. Nevertheless, with all upcoming changes in world’s economy, industrial requirements and ecological awareness, the necessity of considering energy efficiency in manufacturing systems design becomes crucial. This paper introduces the first variant of energy-efficient buffer allocation problem (EE-BAP). It addresses a novel integrated analytical method to find the best buffer allocation that optimizes both throughput and energy consumption for serial production lines with unreliable machines. A large experimental study, based on different instances well established in the literature, is carried out to analyze the relevance of the proposed method. The obtained results show that considerable energy savings with low or almost no productivity loss are allowed. The energy-efficient BAP is a novel problem that considers the complex trade-off between throughput and energy efficiency performance and introduces new perspectives of research in the field of sustainable manufacturing systems design.