Companies have only limited resources to carry out value-adding activities. In order to achieve high quality
requirements, the goal-oriented and efficient handling of failure incidents is a competence that must be
emphasized. However, the activities associated with this represent an additional effort that consumes part of
the resources available. For this reason, it is important to optimally coordinate the value-adding processes of
service creation on the one hand and the processes of failure management on the other. Accordingly, the
objective of this paper is to program a simulation model for an optimized failure management in manual
assembly, which transforms the failure management from traditionally experience-based to model-based. To
achieve this objective, the consideration of the interactions between the failure management process and
operational activities during the production process is essential. However, in current literature, interactions
between production and failure management still lack detailed descriptions. Thus, both disciplines are often
considered and optimized in isolation. Therefore, an advanced System Dynamics Model representing manual
assembly processes with 23 elementsinvolved is constructed and applied to indicate the interactions between
production and failure management. This enables the optimized configuration of the failure management
activities depending on the circumstances to be taken into account. According to the generated model, a
generic process module is programmed and test runs are performed to assess the model behaviour’s
plausibility. The programmed System Dynamics model is implemented and validated in a use case of a
manual assembly line consisting of two assembly stations. For this purpose, the generated process model is
linked to the production chain of the use case and parameterized accordingly. This procedure demonstrates
that the model can be used to derive general recommendations for action in order to realize an optimized
design of failure management activities.
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