Abstract
In this study, the buffer allocation problem (BAP) in homogeneous, asymptotically reliable serial production lines is considered. A known aggregation method, given by Lim, Meerkov, and Top (1990), for the performance evaluation (i.e., estimation of throughput) of this type of production lines when the buffer allocation is known, is used as an evaluative method in conjunction with a newly developed dynamic programming (DP) algorithm for the BAP. The proposed algorithm is applied to production lines where the number of machines is varying from four up to a hundred machines. The proposed algorithm is fast because it reduces the volume of computations by rejecting allocations that do not lead to maximization of the line's throughput. Numerical results are also given for large production lines.
Highlights
Introduction and literature reviewThe analysis of production or flow lines and, more generally, of manufacturing systems has been the object of numerous studies
We present a dynamic programming algorithm that solves the buffer allocation problem (BAP) of N units of total buffer capacity in a homogeneous asymptotically reliable serial production line consisting of M machines and M − 1 buffers
(3) The dynamic programming (DP) algorithm can be applied in large production lines to effectively find a near-optimal solution to the BAP
Summary
The analysis of production or flow lines and, more generally, of manufacturing systems has been the object of numerous studies. A DP algorithm for the buffer allocation problem problem arising in the Markovian models The latter method can be applied to large production lines at the expense of the accuracy of the numerical results. Altiok [2], among others, studied the phase-type distributions and their use to approximate any general distribution of service or interarrival times in the stochastic modeling of production lines Meerkov and his colleagues have developed performability, a quite interesting theory and method of analysis of production lines. This method was employed in the case of a production line with synchronous transfer as defined in [17], among others, where the steady-state throughput can be approximated in a closed recursive form Another classification of the research work relevant to the BAP is based on whether the lines under study are balanced or unbalanced. The appendix gives the aggregation method for the approximation of throughput for a given buffer allocation, as taken by Lim et al [14]
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