Manufacturing system robustness through integrated modeling

Abstract

Robust design techniques are often applied to the design of manufacturing processes to determine the most robust operating points for a production system. However, such efforts have traditionally been focused on treating the output of each manufacturing operation in isolation. This approach ignores the fact that the sensitivity of each operation to input variation is a function of the operating point, which can only be changed in conjunction with the operating points of all other operations in that system. As such, applying robust design to each operation within a system individually does not guarantee lowest end-ofline variation. This is contrary to commonly held beliefs. What is needed ins..