Impact of Statistical Process Control (spc) on the Performance of Production

The paper presents an approximate analytical method for evaluating the performance of long production lines in which Statistical Process Control techniques are applied. The work is an extension of the paper “Impact of Statistical Process Control (SPC) on The Performance of Production Systems-Part One” in the sense that the method proposed for the two machine production system proposed in that paper, is used as a building block to develop a new method for the analysis of longer lines. In the paper the relations between quality control issues and system performance are investigated for K machines production lines, with K>2 with K-1 finite capacity buffers In order to analyze these systems a two-level decomposition approach is proposed. The original line is decomposed into K-1 sub-systems each one formed by two monitored machines and one buffer. In the paper numerical results are reported to show the accuracy of the method. Moreover, the approach is used for deriving some qualitative properties of the analyzed production systems.