Operations Sequencing in Flexible Production Lines With Bernoulli Machines

In flexible manufacturing environments, the performance of a production system is often affected by the sequence of operations. While performance evaluation, improvement and lean design of production systems have been studied extensively, the joint effect of productivity and quality parameters on operations sequencing remains practically unexplored. Indeed, determining the optimal operation sequence has significant implications from both practical and theoretical perspectives. In this paper, in the framework of Bernoulli reliability and quality models, we develop effective indicators that are simple and easy to implement in practice to determine the optimal operation sequence that maximizes the system's production rate.