Dynamic Bottleneck Identification of Manufacturing Resources in Complex Manufacturing System

Abstract

Bottleneck identification is of great interest in discrete manufacturing fields, as they limit the system’s throughput. However, the bottlenecks are difficult to accurately identify due to the instability and complexity of discrete manufacturing systems. This paper proposes a dynamic bottleneck identification method (DBI-BS) that is based on effective buffers and fine-grained machine states to identify bottlenecks accurately. First, the complex manufacturing system (CMS) with strong coupling between elements is decoupled into several independent parts under the guidance of the effective buffer theory. Then, the machine activity duration method is improved through further fine-grained division, and the machine states are described by the timing flow model. The method to quantify the degree of bottleneck that restricts the system throughput (TH) is proposed on the basis of the turning point theory, and the one-to-one mapping relationship between the simulated and authentic complex manufacturing systems is also studied. Simulation results show that the DBI-BS can effectively identify dynamic bottlenecks in complex manufacturing processes, and the decoupling of complex systems can effectively improve the accuracy of dynamic bottleneck identification.

Keywords

• complex manufacturing system
• effective buffers
• fine-grained states
• dynamic bottlenecks
• Industry 4.0
• discrete simulation