Joint design of quality and production control in manufacturing systems

An analytical method for the joint design of quality and production control parameters in unreliable multi-stage lines is proposed in this paper. Specifically, the method optimally sets the sample size, the sampling frequency and the position of the control limits of the quality control charts as well as the number of kanban cards at any production stage, by jointly considering the mutual relations between the controllers. Numerical results compare the solution of this integrated design with the configurations obtained by solving the two problems in isolation with existing techniques. They show that great benefits can be achieved by the proposed integrated design of quality and production control parameters, since it fully captures the interaction between the dynamics of the two controllers. (C) 2011 CIRP.