ORIGINAL ARTICLE Analyzing the effect of maintenance strategies on throughput of a typical FMC (3-M, 1-R) Ashok Kumar Gaula • Rajiv Kumar Sharma Received: 13 March 2014 / Revised: 5 May 2014 Ó The Society for Reliability Engineering, Quality and Operations Management (SREQOM), India and The Division of Operation and Maintenance, Lulea University of Technology, Sweden 2014 Abstract In rapidly changing product structures and customer demands flexible manufacturing cells (FMC’s) are most widely used for meeting mid-volume, mid-variety production needs. They can process a variety of products in the same system and thus helps to achieve higher produc- tivity. At the same time the components in FMC are more prone to failure because of their high operating rate. Fur- ther, it becomes more complex when components follow different failure distributions and it is difficult to plan suitable maintenance interventions. To this effect, in the present paper the authors present a hybrid framework by contemporaneous adoption of qualitative and quantitative techniques to model and analyze the failure aspects in FMC. On qualitative part potential failure modes w.r.t. various robot components are identified and risk priority number is obtained using failure mode and effect analysis. On quantitative analysis, use of Generalized Stochastic Petri Net is made and simulation experiments were carried out to model and analyze the performance of FMC (3 Machines 1 Robot). Cases of both reliable and unreliable FMC are investigated. Keywords Flexible manufacturing cell Á Petri nets Á FMEA Á Throughput 1 Introduction According to Vineyard and Meredith (1999) flexible manufacturing cell operate at 70–80 % utilization as compared to traditional machines which operates at as low as 20 % utilization. Thus, the components in FMC are more susceptible to wear and tear than the traditional machines operating over the same period of time. Over the last few decades, various researchers have investigated the reliability and maintenance aspects related to FMC’s. Lin et al. (2001) have presented sequential imperfect PM models incorporating adjustment/improvement factors in a hazard rate and effective age. Savsar (2000) developed mathematical models to study and compare the operations of a fully reliable and an unreliable flexible manufacturing cell (FMC), each with a flexible machine, a loading/ unloading robot and a pallet handling system wherein the operation times, loading/unloading times and material handling times were assumed to be random. Sheu and Griffith (2001) have considered a generalized age replacement policy with age dependent minimal repair and random lead time. Bloch-Mercier (2002) has considered a repairable system subject to continuous time Markovian deterioration while running, that leads to failure. Gurler and Kaya (2002) have proposed a maintenance and replacement policy for a multi component, multi-state system, in which both the system and the components can be described through a range of performance levels varying from perfect functioning to complete failure. Wang (2002) surveyed, summarized and compared the various existing maintenance policies for both single and multi-unit sys- tems. Chen et al. (2003) have proposed a combined state and time-dependent maintenance policy for a Markovian deteriorating multi-state system with inspection equipment A. K. Gaula (&) Á R. K. Sharma National Institute of Technology, Hamirpur, HP, India e-mail: ashokkumargaula@gmail.com R. K. Sharma e-mail: rksnith@gmail.com 123 Int J Syst Assur Eng Manag DOI 10.1007/s13198-014-0268-8