Monotonic and non-monotonic properties of product quality in flexible manufacturing systems with batch operations

Many flexible manufacturing systems implement batch production, in order to shorten changeover time, reduce cost, and improve quality. In such systems, different types of products are grouped into batches where all parts in each batch have the same type. The change of product type only occurs after the last job in a batch is processed. In this paper, we present an analytical method to evaluate the quality performance of flexible manufacturing systems with batch operations and investigate the monotonic and non-monotonic properties of product quality with respect to quality failure and repair probabilities and batch sizes.