Study of Throughput Improvement for an Unreliable Work Center in terms of Alternating Renewal Process

This paper presents both numerical simulation and closed form methods to calculate performance measures in production line, such as expected the transient throughput, and the probability that measures the delivery in time, for an unreliable work center without intermediate buffers. Such approaches are based on the assumptions that (1) work center alternates between Normal and Failed; (2) up times and down times are i.i.d./independent (but with exponential distributions required in closed form method); (3) work center has the fixed production rate µ. Numerical experiments that compare values of such performance measures by different methods are presented in terms of an unreliable work center cited from literature. The sensitivity of such measures with respect to either mean up time or mean down time is also presented to investigate how and how much improvement can be achieved.

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