Development of bottleneck detection methods allowing for an effective fault repair prioritization in machining lines of the automobile industry

Fault repair prioritization is an important topic for organizing operators in every plant where their numbers are restricted. Prioritization helps the operators to focus on critical machines to increase the machining line’s output. The goal of this paper is to define and test effective fault repair prioritization methods based on analytically identified bottlenecks. For that purpose, several bottleneck detection methods known from the literature were analyzed; however, none of them was able to be used for a fault repair prioritization in typical machining lines of the automobile industry. Hence, three new bottleneck detection methods are going to be introduced in this paper. The new methods focus on the detection of short-term and real-time bottlenecks, as well as on near future bottlenecks. At the end of the paper the effectiveness of the new methods is tested using a simulation model of a real machining line in the automobile industry.