Decision making procedure of demand satisfaction and production policy for capacitated production systems

This paper develops a reliability-based decision making procedure for production systems to (i) evaluate the system reliability and (ii) determine the reliable production policy. The production system is represented as a capacitated production network (CPN) for system reliability evaluation, in which the system reliability is defined as the probability of demand satisfaction. The decision making to determine a reliable production policy is based on the derived system reliability. Two layouts are considered in this paper: the first layout is for the CPN with parallel lines; while the second layout is for the CPN with joint lines. Transformation and decomposition techniques are proposed to generate all minimal capacity vectors that workstations should provide to satisfy demand. In terms of the minimal capacity vectors, the system reliability is derived by applying the recursive sum of disjoint products (RSDP) algorithm. A case study in the context of footwear production system is utilized to demonstrate the decision making procedure.