A novel reliability analysis method for manufacturing systems based on component swapping

Abstract The failure of components can lead the whole system to fail, replacing an important component with another one of the same type can help the system to rework at lower cost. In this paper, a component swapping method is presented based on the components importance analysis. First, an appropriate manufacturing process is selected before calculating system reliability. Based on the current manufacturing requirements and processing strategy, the reliability block diagram of manufacturing process is constructed for the structure analysis. Then the system reliability is calculated after completing the structure analysis by the application of survival signature. Finally, system reliability is improved by the proposed component swapping method. The effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed approaches are demonstrated with two examples of manufacturing system.