Impact of error recovery on the productivity of a unitary assembly cell

A model that illustrates the impact of error recovery on the productivity of a unitary assembly cell performing one assembly operation at a time is presented. At the design stage of an assembly cell, the determination of the appropriate structure for the error recovery requires a consideration of the tradeoff between productivity and yield. This analysis provides a methodology for the justification of various structural alternatives. For an existing unitary assembly cell, the model can be used to analyze the system performance and estimate the numbers of components required for a given assembly batch size. A sensitivity analysis of the model can be used to identify critical operations whose improvement will result in the maximum increase in productivity of the assembly cell