Abstract
In this paper, the analytical appproaches are presented for jointly determining the profit-miximizing configuration of the fault-tolerance real time modular cell manufacturing system. The transient(time-dependent) analysis of Markovian models is firstly applied to modular cell manufacturing system from a performability viewpoint whose modeling advantage lies in its ability to express the performance that truly matters - the user's perception of it - as well as various performance measures compositely in the context of application. The modular cells are modeled with hybrid decomposition method and then availability measures such as instantaneous availability, interval availability, expected cumulative operational time are evaluated as special cases of performability. In addition to this evaluation, sensitivity analysis of the entire manufacturing system as well as each machining cell is performed, from which the time of a major repair policy and the optimal configuration among the alternative configurations of the system can be determined. Secondly, the recovery policies from the machine failures by computing the minimal number of redundant machines and also from the task failures by computing the minimum number of tasks equipped with detection schemes of task failure and reworked upon failure detection, to meet the timing requirements are optimized. Some numerical examples are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the work.