Abstract
This paper examines serial production lines with unreliable non-identical parallel machines at each workstation and intermediate buffers with finite capacities. All machines are assumed to have exponential service times, times to failure and repair times. An efficient decomposition technique is introduced for the performance evaluation of such lines. Rather than replacing each parallel-machine workstation with an equivalent single-server workstation, the main contribution of this paper is the presentation of a direct approach to derive and apply decomposition equations directly for every parallel machine at each workstation. Experimental results indicate that such a method can provide a computationally efficient algorithm to analyse large serial unreliable multi-server production lines with a good accuracy compared against simulation and other available methods.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 3881-3904 |
Number of pages | 24 |
Journal | International Journal of Production Research |
Volume | 58 |
Issue number | 13 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - Jul 2 2020 |
Keywords
- decomposition
- exponential models
- finite buffers
- flow lines
- unreliable parallel-machine workstations
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Strategy and Management
- Management Science and Operations Research
- Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering