Quantitative analysis of manufacturing, product development and business processes

The quantitative analysis of process models is of interest to industry for several reasons. It identifies critical activities in a process, improves the process performance, and decreases downtime and operating cost of the process. In this research, four different frameworks for process analysis and reengineering are developed.;The problem of evaluating reliability of manufacturing and product development processes represented with an IDEF3 model is considered. An IDEF3 model often includes a large number of parent activities connected with various links and logical junctions. Each parent activity in the model may be decomposed into lower level activities. In this research, a procedure is developed based on the fault tree analysis technique and minimum path and cut sets algorithms for reliability evaluation of the parent activities in an IDEF3 model. Once the reliability of the parent activities is evaluated, the reduction approach is used to evaluate the system reliability when the number of parent activities in the model is small. For a large model minimal cut and path sets methods are developed. To evaluate the functional state of the model a tracking technique based on cut set-activity and path set- activity incidence matrices is developed. To determine activities which are critical to the model and require more focus, a measure of structural and reliability importance of parent activities as well as elementary activities in a decomposed model is developed.;The framework based on the IDEF methodology, stream analysis approach, and dynamic simulation for process analysis and reengineering is developed. A procedure is proposed to extend the IDEF methodology by allowing the inclusion of quantitative information, improving its process analysis and reengineering capability, and facilitating the formulation of a dynamic simulation model.;IDEF0 methodology is used to model manufacturing systems and an analytical technique is proposed for the availability evaluation of manufacturing systems. The novelty of the approach is that it incorporates imperfect coverage and repair factors in the analysis. The advantage of the model and the transient analysis presented in this research is that has the capability to perform sensitivity analysis of an entire manufacturing system as well as its components.