An Algorithm for Calculating Expected Production Function and other Similar Functions for a Flexible Manufacturing System

The fact that for the case when the number of machines in each group is the same, the expected production function is a symmetric function of scaled workloads, is exploited to express this function in terms of the, basic symmetric functions of the loads. The same technique is suggested for calculating the probability of all the machines being found busy and the variance of the proportion of busy machines in the system.