Manufacturing systems are increasingly becoming automated and complex in nature. Highly reliable and flexible manufacturing systems (FMSs) are the necessity of manufacturing industries to fulfill the increasing customized demands. Worldwide, FMSs are used in industries to attain high productivity in production environments with rapidly and continuously changing manufactured goods structures and demands. Reliability prediction plays a very significant role in system design in the manufacturing industry, and two crucial issues in the prediction of system reliability are failures of equipment and system configuration. This novel work presents a stochastic model to analyze the performance of an FMS through its reliability characteristics, in the concern of its equipment. To improve the reliability of FMS, determine the sensitivity of the reliability measures of FMS. FMS consists of many components such as machine tools like CNC, automatic handling and material storage, controller and robot for serving load. The designed system is studied by using the Markov process, supplementary variable technique, Laplace transformation, coverage factor and Gumbel–Hougaard family copula to obtain various reliability measures. For some realistic approach, particular cases and graphical illustrations are also obtained.
