Implementing the Concept of Alarm Flexibility During Production

An interruption at a workstation is a major cause of production downtime, which has negative effects on performance, cost, consumer-centric value, and efficiency. Blockage and starvation brought on by broken workstations have a domino effect on the entire production line. In order to allocate resources effectively and minimise downtime, it is crucial to conduct a thorough analysis of the effects of each disruption. Quantitative analysis of disruption at a single workstation and its effects on neighboring workstations are performed in the work presented. Faulty workstations have an additional threshold value added to the Alarm Trip Point (ATP) depending on their current state. When compared to previous approaches, this one significantly improves upon downtime mitigation and batch rejection reduction. A more general model based on multiple workstations has been developed by expanding the analysis done for a single workstation. The proposed work is demonstrated on an experimental case study, an Asphalt-Processing Plant, where it is applied in addition to developing a theoretical model to reduce downtime, multiple starts and stops, and numerous rejections. The proposed method reduces start-stop events by 60%, which in turn reduces rejections and downtime while simultaneously increasing consumercentric value and efficiency.