Demand satisfaction and decision-making for a PCB manufacturing system with production lines in parallel

This paper studies demand satisfaction and decision-making for a printed circuit board (PCB) manufacturing system. A performance indicator, the system reliability, is proposed to evaluate the demand satisfaction. In particular, two important characteristics, (i) multiple production lines in parallel and (ii) multiple repair actions, are considered in this study. The PCB manufacturing system is modelled as a stochastic-flow manufacturing network (SFMN) by the graphical transformation and decomposition techniques. Based on the network-structured SFMN, this paper develops an algorithm to generate all minimal capacity vectors that workstations should provide to satisfy a given demand. In terms of all minimal capacity vectors, the system reliability is derived. In addition, the reliable production policy is determined based on each single minimal capacity vector.