The mass customisation manufacturing (MCM) paradigm has created a problem in manufacturing
control implementation, as each individual customer has the potential to disrupt
the operations of production. The aim of this study was to characterise the manufacturing
effects of customers’ decisions in product configuration, in order to research steady state
control requirements and work-in-process distributions for effective MCM operations. A
research method involving both analytic and empirical reasoning was used in characterising
the distributed control environment of manufacturing systems involved in MCM.
Sequences of job arrivals into each manufacturing system, due to customers’ decisions in
product configuration, were analysed as Bernoulli processes. A customer model based on
this analysis captured the correlation in product configuration decisions over time. Closed
form analytic models were developed from first principles, which described the steady state
behaviour of flow controlled manufacturing systems under generalised clearing policy and
uncorrelated job arrival sequences. Empirical analysis of data sets achieved through discrete
event simulation was used in adjusting the models to account for more complex cases
involving multiple job types and varying correlation. Characteristic response surfaces were
shown to exist over the domains of manufacturing system load and job arrival sequence
correlation.
A novel manufacturing flow control method, termed biased minimum feedback (BMF) was
developed. BMF was shown to posses the capability to distribute work-in-process within
the entire manufacturing facility through work-in-process regulation at each manufacturing
system, so as to increase the performance of downstream assembly stations fed from parallel
upstream processing stations. A case study in the production of a configurable product
was used in presenting an application for the models and methods developed during this
research. The models were shown to be useful in predicting steady state control requirements
to increase manufacturing performance. / Thesis (Ph.D.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 2013.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:netd.ac.za/oai:union.ndltd.org:ukzn/oai:http://researchspace.ukzn.ac.za:10413/10423 |
| Date | January 2013 |
| Creators | Walker, Anthony John. |
| Contributors | Bright, Glen. |
| Source Sets | South African National ETD Portal |
| Language | en_ZA |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
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