Premium
THE VALIDITY OF THE INDEPENDENT INCREMENTS ASSUMPTION FOR PRODUCTION: AN EMPIRICAL STUDY OF AN AUTOMOTIVE ASSEMBLY PLANT
Author(s) -
INMAN ROBERT R.,
LEON MAURICIO
Publication year - 1993
Publication title -
production and operations management
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 3.279
H-Index - 110
eISSN - 1937-5956
pISSN - 1059-1478
DOI - 10.1111/j.1937-5956.1993.tb00103.x
Subject(s) - production (economics) , intuition , automotive industry , computer science , econometrics , interval (graph theory) , property (philosophy) , independence (probability theory) , operations management , mathematics , statistics , operations research , economics , microeconomics , engineering , psychology , philosophy , epistemology , combinatorics , aerospace engineering , cognitive science
In assembly plants, random line stoppages cause production variability. For analytic tractability and data availability, researchers commonly assume that the production process possesses the independent increments property (necessary for a process to be Poisson). If the production process has independent increments, then the production in any interval is independent of the production in any other nonoverlapping interval. This property means, for one thing, that the current period's production is never influenced by previous production periods. Intuition, however, suggests that current production could be correlated to past production‐violating this assumption of independence. If production problems persist from one period to the next, then one would expect the production in adjacent time periods to be correlated. Although the independent increments property is oflen assumed, its validity has not been demonstrated in practice. We analyze data from an automotive assembly plant to assess the validity of the independent increments assumption for its production.