An Approach to Enhancing Manufacturing Throughput Capability through System Design

This article presents a new approach that integrates and balances cycle time and reliability considerations during system design to enhance manufacturing system capability, with direct applicability to automotive and high-volume manufacturing. The method addresses system throughput capability in three steps without complex mathematical modeling. The steps are: (1) managing workload cycle times, (2) considering real-world operational availability, and (3) achieving capability balance. Through analytical estimation and discrete event simulation of an example manufacturing system, this approach’s application shows a substantial increase in throughput capacity compared to a traditional workload-based design. This throughput-centric design approach, serving as a valuable tool for manufacturing system synthesis aimed at maximizing throughput, can apply to volume production systems to enhance throughput capacity through system design.