GOALI: Quality Analysis in Flexible Manufacturing Systems: A Systems Approach

该奖项为建立一个分析框架提供资金，以调查灵活性对灵活制造系统中产品质量的影响，并将结果应用于通用汽车的生产系统。具体而言，工作包括导出一种方法来解决柔性制造系统中质量性能的分析建模，开发一种方法来识别以最强方式阻碍质量性能的机器和产品类型，即，我们的目标是解决瓶颈机器和产品的问题，研究适当的批量或生产顺序，以满足质量要求和客户订单，最后，将这些技术应用于通用汽车制造厂的喷漆和机加工操作。研究的方法将基于马尔可夫过程的分析研究，描述了灵活的系统。质量性能将被建模为以产品类型和序列为特征的多个状态之间的转换的函数，以及机器之间质量变化的传播。本研究的挑战在于找到一个适当的数学描述，这种功能及其参数，如果成功的话，本研究的结果将建立一个新的分析方法来研究柔性和质量之间的相互作用，并从质量的角度提供见解的生产系统设计。这种方法将使我们能够评估质量性能，识别瓶颈，并设计调度策略（排序和排序），以实现最佳质量和可靠的需求满足。本研究的成功完成将为制造系统的研究开辟一个新的方向，并为成本、生产率、质量和柔性的综合研究奠定坚实的基础。此外，它将为生产工程师提供定量工具，用于分析，改进和设计柔性制造系统的质量。最后，所获得的结果将不仅适用于汽车，而且适用于其他制造业（例如，半导体、电器等）也

This Grant Opportunity for Academic Liaison with Industry (GOALI) award provides funding for the establishment of an analytical framework to investigate the impact of flexibility on product quality in flexible manufacturing systems and application of the results to production systems at General Motors. Specifically, the work includes deriving a method to address the analytical modeling for quality performance in flexible manufacturing systems, developing an approach to Identify the machine and the product type that impede the quality performance in the strongest manner, i.e., bottleneck machine and product, investigating the appropriate batch size or production sequence so that both the quality requirements and customer orders are satisfied, and finally, implementing the techniques to the painting and machining operations at General Motors manufacturing plants. The approach of the research would be based on analytical investigation of Markov processes that describe the flexible systems at hand. Quality performance will be modeled as a function of transitions among multiple states characterized by product types and sequences, and propagation of quality variations among the machines. The challenge of this research lies in discovering an appropriate mathematical description of such function and its arguments.If successful, the results of this research will establish a novel analytical method to study the interaction between flexibility and quality, and to provide insights for production system design from the point of view of quality. Such a method will enable us to evaluate quality performance, identify bottlenecks, and design scheduling policies (sequencing and batching) to achieve the best quality and reliable demand satisfaction. The successful completion of this research will open up a new direction in manufacturing systems research and build a solid foundation for integrated study of cost, productivity, quality and flexibility. Furthermore, it will provide production engineers with quantitative tools for analysis, improvement, and design of flexible manufacturing systems with respect to quality. Finally, the results obtained will be applicable not only to automotive but also to other manufacturing industries (e.g., semiconductor, appliance, etc.) as well.