System reactivity components in cellular manufacturing subjected to frequent unavailability of physical and human resources

In manufacturing systems, different types of disturbances influence system´s performance. In this paper those components within a manufacturing cell contributing to maintain a higher performance, despite the influence of internal disturbances such as machine breakdowns and operator unavailability, are investigated. Discrete event simulation is used to model the processing and material handling subsystems within a cellular manufacturing. Experimentation is conducted using a full factorial design and data analysis is performed using analysis of variance. The results indicated that, in terms of systems reactivity, processing subsystems aspects such as the skills of the operators, the capacity of the buffers and the duration of machine set-ups are more efficient in coping with work-in-progress (WIP) resulting from the effect of disturbances than aspects related to the material handling sub system.