An improvement scheme for the overall line effectiveness of a production line: A case study

This paper formulates an overall line effectiveness (OLE) improvement scheme for a production line on the basis of Fourier amplitude sensitivity test (FAST) and stochastic Kriging (SK) surrogate model. It is known that improving the key parameters that have great influence on the target performance can bring better effect on the performance than improving other parameters. Thus this paper is concentrated on improving the OLE of a production line through improving multiple key parameters related to the OLE. In the proposed procedure, FAST is used to identify the key parameters for the OLE and a SK surrogate model is built to evaluate the OLE of the production line instead of a simulation model, improving the work efficiency effectively. At last, a comparison with the continuous improvement process (CIP) shows that the scheme formulated with FAST and SK surrogate model is easier to be implemented than the one generated by CIP, because the procedure provided in this paper can give further suggestion to improve the OLE when the improvement of the bottleneck is limited.