A Tutorial on Concepts and Measures of Manufacturing Processes

In a large-scale production system such as building a Boeing 777 airplane, there are more than ten thousand jobs. The interdependence structure among jobs and some jobs’ delay’s influence on the other jobs in different manufacturing areas are critical information to understand the status of their area. Relationship among groups of jobs may help us find the root cause of problems, to estimate resource planning and to prioritize their tasks. This tutorial is intended to review and introduce commonly used concepts and measures of stochastic dependence. In particular, we focus on concept of positive quadrant dependence, global and local measures of bivariate dependence. Some categorical data analysis techniques and probabilistic models will also be presented. Monte-Carlo simulation techniques will be introduced to provide confidence intervals for estimated measures. Finally, we apply the statistical methods in this tutorial to Boeing 777 production processes as a case study.