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Determining: Staffing
Determining: Staffing
Determining: Staffing
steady state results for this model are known for few
interarrival and service time distributions, (2) the steady
state situation is an overall average and doesn’t reflect
the transient state, which is very close to daily operation.
For a review of queuing models refer to [4; 10].
Keywords: optimal level, maintenance Discrete event simulation is a natural framework for
crew, industrial environment, produc- estimating the needed crafts to perform maintenance
tion activities [3; 8]. Discrete event simulation has been
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applied to many diverse situations which range from M =
number of machines
simulating commercial laundry facility to simulating c= cost of waiting per unit of time (loss of
neural network [1; 6]. It is suitable for the maintenance due to waiting of machine, I,
situation because assumptions regarding the system in
production)
W waiting time of machine, i, in the
steady state conditions are not required for the approach q(i) =
queue.
of this paper. The purpose of this approach is to link the
The responsibility of maintaining in operational order
staffing of the maintenance to production levels. This certain group of M machines by S repairmen with the
will enable us to evaluate the effect of indirect labor on
the expected level of output. policy to repair each one it breaks down can be repre-
In order to utilize the model presented in this paper,
sented as a queuing model. The machines are consid-
ered as customers in the system. The repairmen are
the following steps are to be performed.
considered as individual servers in the queuing system
if they work individually on different machines, or the
(a) A complete study of the department/plant in
entire crew as a single server if they work together on
order to determine the types of maintenance
one machine. Also a set of r servers, r < S, could result if
crew required, the types of machines repaired,
the types of failure of each machine and their part of the crew works together and the rest work
effect on the production line. individually.
The input population for this model is finite, and the
(b) Outline the existing work order system and queuing discipline is general (GD) in the sense that it
define the logic of work assignment. could be first in first out (FIFO) or last in first serve
(c) Set up the relevant machine servicing model (LIFS) or whatever policy the management sets for
after determining the failure rate of each ma- serving the machines. The distribution of the interarrival
chine, the service rate and the cost of each time is usually assumed to be exponential, but in our
machine being out of service. case it can be any one of the known types of distribu-
tions. The service time distribution could come from any
(d) Develop the simulation software.
of the known distributions. If the collected data do not
(e) Run the model to get the production runs and
fit any one of the known distributions an empirical
from it find the optimal staffing pattern.
distribution for the data can be developed and utilized.
In the case of the exponential interarrival and service
The rest of this paper is organized as follows: Section
2 introduces the machine servicing model. Section 3 times, the model becomes a special case of the birth-
death process and steady state results for queue length,
develops the simulation model. Section 4 presents the average waiting time and Pnare given in [4]. Steady
application of this model to a local soft drink plant. state results for other distributions are developed in [5].
Section 5 outlines the applicability of the machine
In order to utilize this model in the maintenance
servicing model for determining the size of crafts environment, we have to relate the staffing level to the
needed in a maintenance environment, and Section 6
concludes the paper. production level. The decision regarding the amount of
service capacity (size of the maintenance crew) is based
on two considerations. The first is the cost of service,
Machine servicing queuing model and the second is the cost of machines waiting for
The following are the terminology and notation used: service which is directly related to production. This cost
could be regarded as the cost of lost production.
La= queue length =
number of machines waiting Usually the cost of service is easily obtained, and
for service, given that the cost of waiting has been evaluated
E = expectation operator, explicitly, the objective would be to determine the level
of service (crew size) which minimizes the total ex-
L = E(N) Expected number of machines in the
=
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Given the definition in Section 2, the total cost func- list 25 contains the event list. The attributes of all these
tion can be approximated by: lists are as follows:
waiting in the queue. Lists 2 through (n + 1) are used to Figure 2. Flowchart for the main program - main program
indicate whether the repairmen are busy or not. Finally
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Figure 5. Report subroutine _
(1) Depalletizer
Figure 4. Flowchart of the departure subroutine (2) Empty conveyor ..,
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(3) Rinser .
Table 1. Machine #1
(4) Filler
(5) Seamer
(6) Full conveyor
(7) Warmer
(8) Packer
(9) Shrink wrap
(10) Tray conveyor
(11) Palletizer
(12) Refrigeration.
II. Raw Material:
Air, CO2, electrical, water, etc.
III. Programmed Stopping:
Change over, clean up, others.
Table 2. Machine #2
The mechanical breakdown must be fixed by a trained
mechanic, while the other causes of down time (raw
material, programmed stopping) can be fixed by a
worker.
The cost of each repairman (mechanic) is 2500 Saudi
Riyals (SR) per month for 8 hours work in each day. The
loss of profit due to down time at the can line is SR.108/
min estimated as follows:
The data for the interarrival time for service and the
service time for the thirteen machines is obtained from
the production department. From data analysis we
found the critical machines are (1, 4, 5, 6, 8). The rest of
the machines seldom break or cause any significant Table 3. Machine #5
down time.
The distribution of the interarrival time for service
and the service time for each machine is developed
using a software developed for &dquo;goodness of fit&dquo;. We
found that the interarrival time distribution for machine
1 is negative exponential with mean 313, for machine 4
is negative exponential with mean 457, for machine 5 is
a Weibull with parameters 0.839 and 20.35, for machine
6 is Weibull with parameters 0.6482 and 418.32, for
machine 8 is negative exponential with mean 484.
The service time for each machine is generated from
the discrete distribution which takes the values and the
probabilities given in Tables 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5.
Using these distributions, the cost of each repairman
and the loss due to down time, we ran the simulation
model for two months under different scenarios. the maintenance activities the maintenance load can be
divided into types of jobs requiring different crafts.
Summary of the results is given in Table 6. Craft types include machinist, electrical, instrument,
Application of the machine servicing model to the building and janitorial. Instead of representing mainte-
nance in a micro level as machines needing work, the
maintenance staffing problem
maintenance work can be represented as five types of
The machine servicing model with general input machines depending on the maintenance jobs. Hence
distribution and general servicing distributions fits the we can have a hypothetical machine representing a class
environment of maintenance operations. Depending on or type of work. As an example electrical type of jobs
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Table 4. Machine #6
Table 5. Machine #8
,~ ~ ......:
Conclusion
The model developed has been verified by running it
for a long time under simplifying conditions such as
experimental interarrival time for maintenance jobs and
experimental service time, and we obtained the usual
steady state results.
Table 6. Summary of the output A validation test has been conducted by running the
model under the same conditions as the plant studied in
this paper, and the behavior of the model was similar to
what is observed by the operation people at the plant.
The attributes looked at in the validation were the
percent down time per month and utilization of the
mechanical operation.
A simulation model which provides a framework for
estimating optimal maintenance crew size has been
can be grouped together and be represented by a single developed and has been applied to a local soft drink
machine. The number of machines is determined by the plant. Also the proposed approach offers a way to link
maintenance directly to production and decide the
types of work/crafts needed. The frequency and the maintenance crew size based on its effect on the target
type of work at the maintenance department for each production. The model can provide the means to
machine can be estimated from historical data of the
maintenance load [7]. integrate the maintenance resource structure, mainte-
nance strategy and overall plant objectives. The
The modification needed to the classical machine
applicabilities of the machine servicing model for
servicing model is to define machines in terms of the determining maintenance staffing in realistic mainte-
type of work needed to keep the plant running. Each nance environment have been demonstrated. The model
type work requires a specific craft. The model can be suggests that in such complex situations simulation is
generalized to estimate the size and the level of training one of the viable approaches for determining mainte-
for crafts by dividing each machine (work type/craft)
into smaller machines depending on the level of
nance staffing.
specialty needed for each craft. Figure 6 is a schematic
diagram for the above representation. Acknowledgments
It can be seen that the simple machining servicing
model can be restructured and extended to represent a The authors acknowledge the support by the Depart-
realistic maintenance situation in order to estimate the ment of Systems Engineering, King Fahd University of
size and specialty of crafts needed to perform mainte- Petroleum and Minerals, Dhahran 31261, Saudi Arabia.
nance effectively. Assistance provided by Khalid Al-Bassam and
Mohammad Junaid towards completion of this study
and computation is acknowledged as well.
98
References SALIH OSMAN DUFFUAA is an
Associate Professor at the Department of
1. Cheng, T. C. E.; Feiring, B. R., "Simulation Modelling of a Systems Engineering, King Fahd
Commercial Laundry Facility", International Journal of
University of Petroleum & Minerals,
Modelling and Simulation, Vol. 2, No.1,1991, pp.16-20. Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. He has a Ph.D.
2. Duffuaa, S. O., Raouf, A., "A Simulation Model for degree in Operations Research from the
Determining Optimal Staffing in an Industrial Environ- University of Texas at Austin, in 1982. He
ment", Proceedings of the 10th National Computer Conference has Diploma in Statistics and B.S. in
and Exhibition, Jeddah, Feb. 1988, pp. 551-563. Mathematics for the University of
3. Garzia, M. R., "Discrete Event Simulation Methodologies Khartoum, Sudan. He has published over
and Formalisms", Simulation Digest, Vol. 21, No.1,1990, 25 papers in the area of Operations Research. His current
areas of interest are: simulation, scheduling, mathematical
pp. 3-13.
4. Hamady, T., Operations Research: An Introduction, Third programming, and maintenance engineering.
Edition, MacMillan Publishing, 1992.
5. Hiller, Liberman, Introduction to Operations Research, 2nd
ABDUL RAOUF is a Professor of
Edition, Holden Day, Inc.,1980.
6. House, D. E., "Simulating Neural Network Learning with Systems Engineering at the King Fahd
Test/N.L", Simulation Digest
University of Petroleum & Minerals,
, Vol. 20, No. 2,1989, pp. 22- Dhahran, Saudi Arabia since 1984. Before
30.
joining this university, he was Professor
7. Kelly, A., Maintenance and Its Management, Conference and Chairman of the Industrial Engineer-
Communication, Monks Hill, England, 1989. ing Department at the University of
8. Law, M. L., Kelton, W.D., Simulation Modeling and Analysis, Windsor, Ontario, Canada. He is actively
McGraw-Hill, New York,1982. engaged in teaching, supervising ~ ~
9. Raouf, A., "Methods of Predicting Indirect Labor Staffing," graduate students and consultancy. He
has over 100 articles published in various professional
Univ. of Windsor, I. R. I. Report, 1968.
10. Saaty, T. L., Element of Queuing Theory with Application,
journals. His current areas of interest are: optimizing produc-
tion system and maintenance engineering.
Dover Edition, 1983.
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