Abstract

Traditional production system design approaches have concentrated on feasibility, meeting volume requirements, and minimizing cost. In the competitive environment of today's industries, effective and robust production systems are required. In order to be responsive to changing external requirements and internal disturbances, productions systems must be robust and design approaches must involve more than meeting volume requirements and minimizing cost. A robust production system can handle planned as well as unplanned changes. It is well understood that the robustness can be achieved during the design process more easily and with lower costs, than during the operation phase when most system parameters are already set. There is a need to improve strategies to develop production systems which are designed from the standpoint of robustness and quality. The system robustness should be made during the design phase and not during operation when most system parameters cannot be changed with ease. Also, there has been limited research in the area of robustness and quality for production system design in the literature. The objective of this research is to demonstrate a method for the design of robust production systems with the aid of computer simulation and to optimize a production process through simulation to make the system robust to noise factors. It has been emphasized in this research to use robust design techniques, also known as Taguchi's methods to achieve robust production systems.