Enhancing Manufacturing Efficiency Through Alarm Flexibility in Smart Systems

Disruption of a workstation is the major contributor to the downtime in any manufacturing process, and it impacts the performance, cost, consumer’s centric value, and efficiency. The effect cascaded in the whole assembly line by blockage and starvation caused by defective workstations. Consequently, the key to appropriately allocating resources and limiting downtime is an accurate understanding of the aftermath of each disturbance. The work presented here investigates how disruptions at a single workstation can affect nearby workstations. The researchers modified the Alarm Trip Point (ATP) by setting a threshold value for a malfunctioning workstation. This can increase or decrease the ATP depending on the state of the workstation. By using this strategy, downtime and batch rejection can be reduced. The researchers then extended their study from a single workstation to multiple workstations, creating a more general model. They deployed their strategy to an asphalt processing plant as an experimental case study in order to illustrate how effective it is in decreasing downtime, frequent starts and stops, and numerous rejections. The proposed approach in the study resulted in a decrease in the number of starts and stops, downtime, and a number of rejections by a significant amount. The number of start-stop events was reduced by 60%, resulting in a significant decrease in the number of rejections and downtime, and finally increasing the consumer-centric value and efficiency. The study also presented a comparison of the proposed approach with the ATP approach by Yu et al., which showed that the proposed approach outperformed the ATP approach in terms of reduction in downtime and rejection.