Reliability of a Maintainable Manufacturing Network subject to Budget

Applying network analysis, a manufacturing system can be constructed as a manufacturing network by representing each workstation as an arc and each inspection station as a node. In particular, the capacity of each workstation is stochastic (i.e. multistate) due to the possibility of failure, partial failure, and maintenance. In practical cases, such a manufacturing network has to achieve a specified production level to satisfy the customers’ orders. Hence, maintenance is necessary to guarantee a manufacturing network can retain a minimal production level. A maintenance model, namely maintainable manufacturing network (MMN), is proposed to evaluate whether the manufacturing system can provide sufficient capacity subject to maintenance budget or not. The maintenance reliability is further proposed to calculate the probability that the MMN provides a sufficient capacity level to meet the minimal production level under maintenance budget