The Modelling of Quality and Production of Heaters for Oil Refinery

Abstract

The quality of the product helps in developing the brand image of the product. The quality management is one of the most vital areas of operations manager who plans and monitors the quality in every stage of production of each component. It, therefore, becomes customary for operations manager to structure the quality monitoring system to achieve the intended quality to satisfy the customer. The structuring of quality monitoring system comes from how we develop the modelling of production and quality of a product. With this backdrop, the modelling of quality and production of heaters used in oil refinery has been developed and presented in this article using the extended frame work of physical system theory (PST). The PST has been used by earlier researchers for modelling a particular production system1 using flow of materials as “through” variables and cost as “across” variables. In this article the “quality” has been considered as a third variable for modelling the quality for production of heaters. The production of heaters is a complex manufacturing system, so for clarity of the readers, the quality modelling of a very simple production system has been presented as an illustrative example. Since the quality is an individual perception, for computing the value of quality variables a method has been suggested which meets the basic quality requirements desired by the industry. Based on the developed model, the sensitivity analysis has been performed to assess the impact of changes in the parameters on the quality of output.