Performance Analysis of a Serial Production Line with Machine Breakdowns

摘要

Nowadays almost all kinds of mass products are produced in automated flow shops,in which there are machines acting on product parts. The order in which the parts meet the machines in the flow shop is usually fixed. The main problem of such a flow shop is that the machines are prone to failure. When a failure occurs the rest of the shop should remain manipulating parts, as stand still of machines is too expensive. To meet this requirement as well as possible and to make the flow shop more flexible, temporary storage of parts has to be introduced. Such a temporary storage device is called a buffer. A property of buffers is that they by nature have limited capacity. In the paper a model will be presented that describes a buffer flowshop with limited buffer capacities and with machines prone to failure. By means of this model it will be possible to describe the stochastic flowshop dynamics and derive average values for throughput and average buffer contents. This model can help optimizing a flow shop, for example by changing the configuration, changing the buffer sizes, changing the failure rates. Even effects of extra or other machines can be evaluated. (Copyright (c) 1993 by Faculty of Technical Mathematics and Informatics, Delft, The Netherlands.)