The rapid development of big data technologies can improve the maintainability of machines and equipment in manufacturing systems, which could impact the selection of the optimal system architecture. In this paper, two typical architectures for large manufacturing systems − serial lines in parallel and reconfigurable manufacturing systems − are considered, and their productivities are compared. A decision locus is calculated that divides the configuration space into two areas; in each area, one of the architectures is the preferred one. It is also investigated how the locus is affected by different parameters, such as system size, buffer capacity and machine or gantry maintainability. The analysis provides valuable managerial insights for designing the architecture of large manufacturing systems.

The impact of maintainability on the manufacturing system architecture

A design methodology for wind farm layout considering cable routing and economic benefit based on genetic algorithm and GeoSteiner

Chemical industry area-wide layout design is a significant section for enterprises management. Its main aim is to improve production efficiency and operational safety. At current stage, relative location of plants in an industrial area is determined by expertise based on material flow for shortening material transportation distance. However, few systematic methodology has been proposed to guide the material flow based area-wide layout design. Moreover, heat flow, such as steam, is often ignored in area-wide layout design, leading to a longer piping of heat and a higher energy loss. In this paper, a systematical area-wide layout design methodology is proposed considering both material flow piping and steam piping. A genetic algorithm based methodology is proposed to optimize the area-wide layout according to piping implementation. Different from one-to-one connection for material piping, steam piping configuration is an optimization with multi-branches pipe network and the calculation is difficult. To solve the problem, improved Kruskal algorithm is used in proposed method. In addition, some safety and environmental issues are considered in the model. A case study consisting of three scenarios is constructed to prove the effectiveness of the proposed methodology.

A chemical industry area-wide layout design methodology for piping implementation

A heuristic approach for petrochemical plant layout considering steam pipeline length

Maintainability is a critical design characteristic of products. Maintainability evaluation plays an important role in maintainability design. Existing maintainability evaluation approaches neglect logistic effects on system maintainability. In this paper, tuples of stochastic colored petri nets (SCPN) are used to express the constituents of a maintenance process; and the maintenance process model is developed based on the SCPN. Approaches for calculating the required maintenance resources are proposed according to the state equation of the SCPN, and a method for calculating maintenance time is proposed by using an SCPN based discrete-event simulation. Finally, the line maintenance of a wheel steering system is used as a case study to illustrate the application and effectiveness of our proposed approaches. The work discussed herein provides a maintainability evaluation methodology based on the maintenance task demonstration that is conducted on the digital mockup of products. The approaches can be applied in the design stage when there are no physical mockups, and the maintainability design can be carried on concurrently with the development of products.

Maintenance Process Simulation Based Maintainability Evaluation by Using Stochastic Colored Petri Net

Maintainability of a mechanical system is one of the system design parameters that has a great impact in terms of ease of maintenance. In this paper, a methodology of facility layout optimum design for maintainability of a ship cabin is presented as a way to improve the efficiency and quality of maintainability design. The maintenance operating space, amount of hoisting, balance of cabin, distance requirement and personnel movement distance are all taken into account, and treated as objective functions. The mechanical functional constraints and some important layout experience are also considered and formulated as constraints. Thus, the mathematical model for maintainability layout combinatorial optimisation is constructed. According to the characteristics of maintainability-based facility layout problem, the particle swarm optimisation algorithm developed by Eberhart and Kennedy is modified to enhance the computational efficiency and solution accuracy. A hybrid position updating method is used to solve t...

Maintainability-based facility layout optimum design of ship cabin

Diesel oil power installation failure diagnosis system based on information amalgamation

To improve the maintainability design efficiency and quality, a layout optimization method for maintainability of multi-component systems was proposed. The impact of the component layout design on system maintainability was analyzed, and the layout problem for maintainability was presented. It was formulated as an optimization problem, where maintainability, layout space and distance requirement were formulated as objective functions. A multi-objective particle swarm optimization algorithm, in which the constrained-domination relationship and the update strategy of the global best were simply modified, was then used to obtain Pareto optimal solutions for the maintainability layout design problem. Finally, application in oxygen generation system of a spacecraft was studied in detail to illustrate the effectiveness and usefulness of the proposed method. The results show that the concurrent maintainability design can be carried out during the layout design process by solving the layout optimization problem for maintainability.

Layout problem of multi-component systems arising for improving maintainability

Maintainability is a design attribute of a product, and its relationship with the design factors is complicated. In consideration of the fuzziness and uncertainty of design factors that influences the product's maintainability indices, we propose a method based on fuzzy grey relational analysis to determine their prioritization in this paper. First, the evaluation methods of various design factors and how these factors affect product maintainability indices are analyzed. Then, the fuzzy grey relational analysis model of the relationship between the design factors and maintainability indices is set up, and the prioritization of design factors to maintainability indices is achieved. Finally, the proposed methods are applied on a subsystem of a manned spacecraft, which indicates that the proposed method can quantitatively analyze the influencing degree of the design factors to maintainability indices. This information can be used to guide maintainability indices evaluation modeling based on digital mock-up i...

Zhexue Ge

Papers

Maintainability-based facility layout optimum design of ship cabin

Diesel oil power installation failure diagnosis system based on information amalgamation

Layout problem of multi-component systems arising for improving maintainability

Fuzzy grey relational analysis of design factors influencing on maintainability indices

A method for the maintainability evaluation at design stage using maintainability design attributes