BACKGROUND Anaesthesia care in developed countries involves sophisticated technology and experienced providers. However, advanced machines may be inoperable or fail frequently when placed into the austere medical environment of a developing country. Failure mode and effects analysis (FMEA) is a method for engaging local staff in identifying real or potential breakdowns in processes or work syst...

Operational time variability is one of the key parameters determining the average cycle time of lots. Many different sources of variability can be identified such as machine breakdowns, setup, and operator availability. However, an appropriate measure to quantify variability is missing. Measures such as overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) used in the semiconductor industry are entirely based ...

A contribution is made in the area of proactive scheduling with the aim to properly define the scheduling problem explicitly incorporating the effects of short-term uncertainties. The idea is to identify a robust initial schedule with the flexibility to react to unexpected events with minimum effects. The problem is modelled using a stochastic optimization approach where not only a set of antic...

It is vital for manufacturing companies not only to cope with frequent product changes and fluctuating demands, but also to reduce the impact of disturbances on the overall manufacturing performance. In this paper a real-time scheduling mechanism for dynamic discrete manufacturing is presented. Modified mean flow time performance for different scheduling approaches is compared through off-line ...

We propose a theoretical framework for detecting and predicting forecast breakdowns, defined as situations where the out-of-sample performance of a forecast method, judged by some loss function, is systematically worse than its in-sample performance. Our framework can be used to establish the robustness of a forecast method in the past, and to predict whether the forecast method will break down...