Optimal design of work-in-process buffers

When customers demand for very short lead-times and for a strict respect of the delivery schedules, it becomes difficult to avoid the existence of relatively large work-in-process buffers. As the buffers will also increase dramatically the production costs, their design (location and capacity) should be carefully analyzed and optimized, a task that becomes rather complex for large production systems. This paper firstly introduces a series of fundamental concepts related to the reliability of production systems. Then, the rationale of an analysis method oriented to this class of systems will be presented, together with its two main components, the modelling framework and the evaluation algorithm. The method allows analysing several issues of the design and operation of the production systems, namely the redundancy of equipment, the layout of the cells and the maintenance policies. To illustrate its practical usefulness and enlighten the kind of results that the method can provide, a numerical example concerning the design of work-in-process buffers of a just-in-time manufacturing system will be presented in the final part of the paper.