Machine failure can have a significant impact on the throughput of manufacturing systems, therefore accurate modelling of breakdowns in manufacturing simulation models is essential. Finite mixture distributions have been successfully used by Ford Motor Company to model machine breakdown durations in simulation models of engine assembly lines. These models can be very complex, with a large numbe...

In today’s global competitive marketplace, there is intense pressure for manufacturing industries to continuously reduce and eliminate costly, unscheduled downtime and unexpected breakdowns. With the advent of Internet and tether-free technologies, companies necessitate dramatic changes in transforming traditional ‘‘fail and fix (FAF)’’ maintenance practices to a ‘‘predict and prevent (PAP)’’ e...

We study the reliability and sensitivity analysis of a system with M operating machines, S warm standbys, and a repairable service station. Failure times and service times of each machine (operating or standby) are assumed to be exponentially distributed. While the service station is working, it is subject to breakdowns according to a Poisson process. When the station breaks down, it requires ...

In today’s competitive market, production costs, lead time and optimal machine utilization are crucial values for companies. Since machine or process breakdowns severely limit their effectiveness, methods are needed to predict products’ life expectancy. Furthermore, information about the remaining life of products and their components is crucial for their disassembly and reuse, which in turn le...

BACKGROUND Breakdowns in communication and coordination are situations of mismatch between actual and expected conditions in joint activities. Breakdowns have been identified as the leading cause of adverse events in healthcare, especially in the Operating Room environment. As a result, researchers have started to examine breakdowns in healthcare as emergent dynamics of teamwork. However, the o...

This paper investigates the interaction between the economics of production and imperfections in the production process. SpeciÞcally, this paper is the Þrst to devise a model in an attempt to provide managers with guidelines to choose the appropriate production run times to buffer against both the production of defective items and stoppages occurring due to machine breakdowns. In addition to pr...