EVALUATE THE RELIABILITY OF A SERU PRODUCTION SYSTEM WITH REWORKING ACTIONS

Abstract

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.