Date of Award

Spring 2015

Degree Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science in Industrial Engineering (MSIE)

Department

Industrial Engineering

First Advisor

Shimon Y. Nof

Committee Chair

Shimon Y. Nof

Committee Member 1

Seokcheon Lee

Committee Member 2

Jose M. Tanchoco

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to investigate and provide tools for the furniture industry, for detecting and preventing damage from propagating errors. Many of the errors cascading in a furniture manufacturing facility are typically detected only after the original process that causes the error had already caused errors. Previous research has developed and validated theoretical methods, such as CEPD, to prevent and detect errors and conflicts. This thesis is the first effort to implement the logic of CEPD in the furniture industry. There are four relevant measures that are analyzed and improved in this thesis; they are preventability, reliability, damage, and time to completion. The study proposed an Efficient inspection assigning method that is based on Centralized and Decentralized strategy. The efficient inspection method increases performance by reducing the working time and maintains the preventability and reliability of the system. The method was validated for a case of laminating department of a furniture industry. A total of eighteen scenarios for the case were analyzed and simulated using ARENA simulation. For comparison, each simulation result scenario went through pairwise t-test. The significance test shows the new Efficient inspection method can maintain preventability and reliability with lower working time: On average, reliability was increased by 0.54% with standard deviation 0.09%; working time was reduced on averaged by 5.54% with standard deviation of 2.13%. Both improvements are directly realized by error and conflict prevention. Future research will address hybrid decentralized/centralized system optimization on performance without deteriorating reliability. Useful observations were also found that can lead to improvements in the CEPD logic.

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