Ford Motor Company

Effects of stochastic downtime are high in a strictly serial processing line. With help from discrete process simulation as an analytical tool, we investigate productivity benefits attainable by reconfiguring the line to operate in parallel or networked mode. The metrics for overall line performance in this study are both average throughput per hour and its variability. Our investigations consider effects of original line length, amount of downtime, and buffer sizes between successive operations. Results indicate that reconfiguration of the line may be economically attractive, relative to attempting to reduce overall downtime. We conclude by describing promising extensions to this work