Designing Productive Manufacturing Systems without Buffers

Modem industrial practice is to minimize work-in-process in order to eliminate inventory-carrying costs and quickly detect quality problems. Reduced work-in-process results from eliminating in-process buffers between operations in serial lines, but is accompanied by decreased system efficiency. Inventories are created before system expansion in order to offset production lost during construction. Furthermore, serial line expansion implies doubling line output. In reconfigurable manufacturing systems, new configurations that have not yet been fully explored by industry can be used to compensate for loss of buffered system isolation failure, creation of inventories, and step-size production expansion. Numerical models are applied to predict productivity and explicitly show the equivalency of alternative configurations to buffered serial transfer lines. Parallel-serial configurations as well as the newly proposed reserve capacity configurations are examined.