Performance evaluation of a multi-product production line: An approximation method

This paper develops an analytical method to measure the performance of a multi-product unreliable production line with finite buffers between workstations. The performance measure used in this paper is Total Cycle Time. The proposed method is an approximation that generalizes the processing times to ease the variation of product types in a multi-product system.A decomposition method is then employed to approximate the production rate of a multi-product production line. The decomposition method considers generally distributed processing times as well as random failure and repair. A GI/G/1/N queuing model is also applied to obtain parameters such as blocking and starvation probabilities that are needed for the approximation procedure. Several numerical experiments under different scenarios are performed and results are validated by simulation models in order to assess the accuracy and strength of the proposed method. Consequent analysis and discussion of the results are also presented.