Prediction of the System Efficiency of Balanced Automatic Transfer Lines

Abstract

This paper presents a simulation study of the system efficiency, in terms of production rate, of automatic transfer lines. A particular type of system, referred to as balanced automatic transfer lines, is considered in the study. In such a balanced automatic transfer line, the stations are considered identical in terms of availability and the buffers are uniformly allocated, and only four system design parameters are involved, namely the number of stations, the identical failure and repair rates, and the uniform buffer capacity. Based upon simulation results, an empirical production rate equation is established by using available optimization techniques for fitting non-linear functions. The empirical relationship is validated using further experimental results. It is shown that this empirical equation can be simply used, with a high enough accuracy in many practical applications, to predict production rates of balanced automatic transfer lines with reasonably wide ranges of system design parameters.