Modeling and Analyzing Supporting Systems for Smart Manufacturing Systems with Stochastic, Technical and Economic Dependences

Smart manufacturing systems are triggerring the next industrial revolution. They are intended to be collaborative manufacturing systems that respond in real time to meet the system's changing demands and conditions. Different types of dependencies among system components are introduced to enable this and to improve system performance, including structural, stochastic, technical and economic dependences. Supporting systems are also introduced to this aim, through specified interfaces. In this paper, the role of maintenance policy, spare part inventory and buffer size as supporting systems of smart systems is considered. Load-sharing dependence, adaptive control with feedback and economic dependence are specifically considered, and their effect is studied via Monte Carlo simulation. Results show that smart systems with properly designed supporting systems have undoubtedly increased system complexity and dependencies, but can indeed increase availability and production volume, and system efficiency overall, with total cost reduced.