Evaluation of redundant configurations and backup stations to support fault tolerant flow line design

Abstract

The fourth industrial revolution, namely Industry 4.0 drive the development of technologies as intelligent industrial robots, share information among workpiece, equipment, and machines, artificial intelligence for the analysis of information and support self-adapting activities. These technologies enable a station of automated flow line to perform different operations on different products without the need of a time-consuming and costly setup. The information sharing among items and other machines of the line allows selecting other stations to process the operation if some problem occurs. This research proposed a framework to support the design of automated flow lines with redundancies of the operations on downstream stations. The framework includes mathematical models to provide design alternatives and a simulation model to evaluate the performance measures. The redundancy models are compared to a configuration with backup stations. The results show how the framework provides information to support the decision maker to select the design alternative considering the operative condition. The model with one redundancy for each operation leads to better results, while the increase in the number of redundancies of each operation reduces the performance. The introduction of the backup station is the better solution, but this is characterized by investment costs in further machines.