Machining Economics and Tool Life Variation—Part 2: Application to Models for Machining Processes

A simple machining operation is modeled according to some management choices by stochastic simulation, taking into account two main tool failure mechanisms. Under the assumption that premature tool failures account for either work interruption or production of defective pieces, the effects of tool change schedule, production block size and sudden failure on production rate and cost are assessed. Some minimum regions are found for expected values of dependent variables, which have no counterpart for upper bound values.