The Small-World Network Model of Mixed Production Line

Mixed production line is a complicate system, so the small-world network model is introduced to describe and analyze the planning and design of mixed production line to raise its stability. Manufacturing units undertaking various production duties are regard as vertices, while relationships between vertices are defined as directed weighted edges. Then the mathematic model is built to characterize their basic elements and network architecture with some feature sets and matrixes. Finally an actual production line with 224 manufacturing vertices and 361 products is presented as an example. Moreover some statistical data might uncover its topological properties and dynamic behavior. Through comparing with random network, the mixed production line shows small-world property. Then redundancy of some vertices with high centrality should be enhanced to reduce frangibility and improve robustness and reliability. Therefore the network model is an available method to solve stability in production line planning.