Reliability-based design methodology for reusable modular assembly systems

Paul Danny
2021
The era of mass production has introduced products with shorter lifecycles which has reduced the utilisation of the production systems. The reuse of production systems can exploit its remaining useful life while positively impacting the environmental, social and economic welfares. The environmental, social and commercial impact of a production system can be forecasted during its design phase. Therefore, it is important for the design phase to consider certain additional features that can
more » ... ate the long-term system sustainability. In this direction, the vision of this work is to incorporate reliability-based reuse policies for generating production system designs. Literatures highlight that the lack of systematic and strategic life cycle planning has been the major obstacle for the reuse of production systems. Furthermore, the historic operational and maintenance information of the used productions systems are not being organised and stored appropriately for reuse considerations. Data-driven approaches are becoming more realistic with historic operational information of the production systems becoming more accessible with the advent of new paradigms such as; 'Industry 4.0' (I 4.0) and 'Industrial Internet of Things' (IIoT). Therefore, the advancements in I 4.0 and IIoT can be used for predicting the remaining useful life of the production equipment. This predicted information can be used during the decision-making process for generating new production system designs/ configurations and reconfigurations.This work was motivated by the current need for a holistic assembly system design methodology that encourages the reuse of second-hand assembly equipment while designing new production lines. The primary agenda behind this motivation is to exploit the remaining useful life of the second-hand equipment by extending their life over several production life cycles. It is difficult to achieve this mainly because of the lack of methods that considers the impact of maintenance actions and the corresponding costs estim [...]
doi:10.26174/thesis.lboro.13351529.v1 fatcat:b2if47k4jngfbiplaq6drrzoiu