A quantitative approach to resilience in manufacturing systems

Resilience is one of the key characteristics that manufacturing systems should have as it offers the ability to withstand difficult situations and be able to accommodate disruptions without the incurrence of significant additional costs. The main contribution of this study is the presentation of a method for quantifying resilience in manufacturing systems based on calculating the penalty of possible changes. The method is applied to an industrially-relevant scenario to estimate the resilience of two production systems when COVID-19 disrupts their production. The first system uses additive manufacturing (3D printing), and the second uses injection moulding. Several scenarios, related to the systems' operational environment, are presented on the basis of pandemic-related possible events. The validation of the proposed resilience measure demonstrates the method's suitability and reliability to be considered in industrial practice, in support of decision-making. The resilience measure can be used by managers to assess, compare and improve their production systems, and decide on strategic investment costs to improve systems' resilience. It can be applied for several disruption scenarios or variations of the same disruption scenario with different disruption characteristics, such as duration, recovery time and impact on the production system.