Conceptual Maps of Reliability Analysis Applied in Reconfigurable Manufacturing System

Reliability has always been an important factor for any manufacturing companies. An appropriate level of reliability in a manufacturing system could mean less maintenance cost, higher efficiency and steadier production state. Because each machine in a manufacturing system has its individual level of reliability, reliability on the system level would depend largely on how the machines are configured. In traditional efforts on reconfigurable manufacturing system (RMS) reliability assessments, mean time between failure (MTBF) is usually adopted as reference index of reliability. Also, in existing research efforts of applying reliability analysis in manufacturing system, reliability is merely a single and over-simplified index in the framework. But there exist various forms of reliability inside a RMS, and the complexity of this concept would keep increasing with the development of new technology in manufacturing industry. To analyze reliability in RMS in a more comprehensive way, we built conceptual maps as first step for research agenda -- from the perspective of general layer, reliability analysis and RMS.