The Demand Absorption Coefficient of a Production Line

In this article, the demand absorption coefficient is proposed as a measure to quantify the degree of flexibility of a process against the variations of its environment in a context of robust planning. The demand absorption coefficient is defined as the slope on the function relating throughput and demand rates. This coefficient measures how demand disturbances are translated into output production rates depending on the capacity and inventory buffers of the production system. Models of serial production lines with different numbers of machines, capacities and sizes of buffers are solved by means of a decomposition method using phase-type distributions to study the behavior of this coefficient.