Resilience Measures of Manufacturing Systems Under Disruptions

Unexpected disruptive events always interrupt normal production condition and cause production losses in the manufacturing system. A resilient system is capable of settling itself to the steady-state quickly after the disruption, and compensating for the lost production by using a relatively little overtime. In this paper, we define throughput settling time (TST) and overtime to recover (OTTR) as two resilience measures to analyze multi-stage serial-parallel systems with unreliable machines and finite intermediate buffers. We perform an exact analysis for a two-stage system and develop an approximation method for general multi-stage systems. Numerical case studies are conducted to investigate the system resilience under different configurations.