EXPLOITING DETERMINISTIC MAINTENANCE OPPORTUNITY WINDOWS CREATED BY CONSERVATIVE ENGINEERING DESIGN RULES THAT RESULT IN FREE TIME LOCKED INTO LARGE HIGH-SPEED COUPLED PRODUCTION LINES WITH FINITE BUFFERS

Conservative engineering design rules for large serial coupled production processes result in machines having locked-in free time (also called ‘critical downtime’ or ‘maintenance opportunity windows’), which cause idle time if not used. Operators are not able to assess a large production process holistically, and so may not be aware that they form the current bottleneck – or that they have free time available due to interruptions elsewhere. A real-time method is developed to accurately calculate and display free time in location and magnitude, and efficiency improvements are demonstrated in large-scale production runs.