A Computational Analysis of Long Transfer Line Behavior

Abstract

Meeting customer demands for order-based production and make‐to‐stock production policies against holding and non-holding costs are fundamental functions for businesses to ensure. For these policies, finite capacity buffers between machines is of great importance. WIP, production rate, and profit values, which are the key performance indicators of the transfer line, affect the sustainable economics of companies. It is important to investigate how the production rate, one of the most important performance indicators, and its calculation time are affected by the reliability parameters of the machines, the convergence rate and the analytical methods applied. In this study, the theoretical computational analysis of Dallery-David-Xie (DDX) algorithm on unreliable transfer line with finite buffers. The results show that the performance of the DDX algorithm is very sensitive to the convergence rate. Also, initial buffer configuration allocations to maximize the profit value in the transfer line are investigated.