Application of a Production System Design Framework to Equipment Design

The use of a structured approach to production system design is an effective means to improve a firm’s overall manufacturing capability. Design of a production system in addition to defining system architecture (subsystem organization and integration) also includes allocating high-level system requirements to subsystems. An area where requirements allocation is critical to system performance is in the specification, selection, and design of equipment. For manufacturing firms that buy rather than build their own equipment, the generation and subsequent communication of system requirements to vendors during the equipment selection phase of system design determines how well final designs meet requirements. The conventional approach for acquiring equipment involves companies generating requirements largely based on product requirements (in the form of a process plan) and then soliciting bids from equipment builders to meet such requirements. However, generally there is no framework for also expressing production system requirements to equipment builders in a manner that may be easily translated into equipment parameters. This paper presents a production system design framework and how it may be applied to equipment design and improve system design. The framework consists of a structured decomposition of production system functional requirements that are related to design parameters of subsystem components via design matrices. The decomposition has been used to generate equipment design guidelines and this paper presents an extension of this approach to integrate equipment design decomposition with that of the production system.