Performance enhancement of production systems using fuzzy based availability analysis and simulation method

Due to the complexity of today's engineering systems, accurate system performance analysis is important to obtain a more productive system design. This study introduces a new approach to obtain a new system design considering system availability to increase its productivity in a more consistent and logical manner. To obtain more productive system design, both fuzzy availability analysis and simulation are used together. The conventional simulation modelling can be used to analyse the system behaviour considering failure and repair data to predict system throughput. This approach solves the problems of scarce data for failures and repairs in the system. The fuzzy availability analysis is used to consider system failures and repairs based on fuzzy set theory. In other words, the integration of simulation results and fuzzy system availability allows for analysing system performance to improve system productivity with new system design even though system failure and repair data are scarce. This new approach has been applied to improve system productivity in a battery production company in Turkey. The analysis results show that this new approach is able to analyse system performance accurately and improve system productivity with a new system design. [Received: 26 November 2018; Accepted: 17 December 2019]