Dynamic Bottleneck in Serial Production Lines with Bernoulli Machines

Abstract

Bottleneck identification and mitigation is one of the most important problems in production system research and practice. In the current literature, the bottleneck is often defined with respect to a system's long term performance. The corresponding mitigation approach is typically to prioritize the improvement of that particular machine. This applies when the improvement cannot be flexibly adjusted or reallocated to other machines in the system and the improvement is to be fixed to a machine for a sufficiently long period of time. In this paper, we attempt to redefine the bottleneck in a dynamic environment. A control-theoretic approach is used to formulate the bottleneck identification and mitigation problem as a state-based feedback control problem with the objective being maximization of steady state throughput. In this framework, we study serial production lines with finite buffers and Bernoulli reliability machines. Computation formulas and procedures are developed to calculate the performance metrics of such systems with dynamic bottleneck control and properties of the optimal control policy are investigated.