Mission reliability analysis of flexible manufacturing cells considering component reliability, task demand, and product quality

Reliability analysis of the flexible manufacturing cell (FMC) can help enterprises master the system state to formulate maintenance strategies better. However, little seems to have been done to access the reliability of the FMC. The current research on the reliability of the manufacturing system mainly focus on the components, which is not completely in line with the actual production. In this paper, we proposed a multi-state mission reliability analysis method of the FMC considering component reliability, task demand, and product quality. Firstly, the multi-state component reliability is expressed by the universal generating function (UGF) constructed by the performance states and the corresponding probabilities. Secondly, the extended state task network (ESTN) is used to integrate component performance, product quality, and task demand. We study the ESTN of the FMC with different system structures. After the above two steps, the component mission reliability can be expressed by the UGF with fewer states. Finally, the multi-state mission reliability of the FMC can be determined by the fusion rules of the UGF. An actual production case is used to illustrate the proposed method.