Performance evaluation of flow lines with non-identical and unreliable parallel machines and finite buffers. Issue 13 (2nd July 2020)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Diamantidis, Alexandros; Lee, Jun-Ho; Papadopoulos, Chrissoleon T.; Li, Jingshan; Heavey, Cathal
• Is Part Of: International journal of production research. Volume 58:Issue 13(2020)
• Page Start: 3881
• Page End: 3904
• Publication Date: 2020-07-02
• Subjects: flow lines -- decomposition -- unreliable parallel-machine workstations -- finite buffers -- exponential models; Factory management -- Periodicals; 658.57
• DOI: 10.1080/00207543.2019.1636322
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0020-7543

Abstract

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.