On the relationships between the design of assembly manufacturing and inspection systems and product quality

Abstract

This study is a response to the observation that little attention has been paid to the relationship between production (manufacturing) system design and product quality. In particular, only very limited work exists analyzing assembly system quality when multiple products are produced in the same system. Here, a computational scheme to estimate material, capacity and resource requirements in assembly manufacturing systems with imperfect quality is proposed. Accurate estimation of these requirements is vital to system design. The proposed scheme integrates the design of both production and inspection systems, accounts for inspection errors of both types—missing defective units and false rejection—and enables the comparison of alternative designs. In addition, the structure of the inspection system significantly affects both the volumes of material flows and the structure of the material flow network. These ramifications of imperfect quality have been overlooked thus far, but are also examined and discussed in this study.