Alena Puchkova presented a paper titled "Towards Lean and Resilient Production" at the Symposium on Information Control in Manufacturing (INCOM 2015) in Ottawa, Canada, May 11-13.

The paper presents issues and trade-offs in attempting to achieve lean production by increasing productivity and reducing costs and waste while at the same time operating with resilience in the face of disruptions. A simple mathematical model of the operation of a production system is proposed, which incorporates two types of disruptive events: resource breakdowns and quality loss.

The model is used to evaluate different inventory and inspection options for managing disruptions. It is expected that the outputs from this work will lead to industrial guidelines for planning a production system configuration, such as number and location of inspection stations, and size and location of buffers.

The co-authors of the paper are Rengarajan Srinivasan, Duncan McFarlane and Alan Thorne. The work is based on the research carried out during the DisTAL (Disruption Tolerant Automated Lean Factories) project funded by the Boeing company.

Further details about the conference can be found at: http://www.incom2015.org/