Overall equipment effectiveness when production speeds and stoppage durations are uncertain

Abstract

Evaluation of manufacturing equipment performance has been very important in production-related functions such as planning, scheduling, and maintenance. Nevertheless, low accuracy of performance measurements can mislead decision makers. In this study, overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) is considered as a performance indicator of manufacturing equipment. In practice, components of OEE may consist of uncertainty due to manual or semi-automatic measurement systems. As a consequence, true performance of equipment may be masked by the uncertainty of measurements. In this study, two types of uncertainty are considered in production speed and stoppage duration measurements, which are used in calculating OEE components. When the measurements have uncertainty due to use of linguistic terms or some minor stoppages, idling, or speed losses being ignored, fuzzy arithmetic is used as a method to handle uncertainty. In some low accuracy cases, best guess interval estimates of operators may better reflect the state than just providing a point estimate. For such cases, interval arithmetic is used as a method to handle uncertainty. Implementation of the methods are illustrated using two real-world examples and a software is provided for practitioners. Proposed methods help making better informed decisions using OEE under measurement uncertainty of production speed and stoppage durations.