Efficient Algorithms for Analysis and Improvement of Flexible Manufacturing Systems

This paper is devoted to modeling, analysis, and improvement of flexible manufacturing systems with asynchronous exponential machines and finite nondedicated buffers. In such systems, each machine may process multiple types of products with different speeds, and buffers are shared for all products. Efficient algorithms to evaluate the system performance are developed. Formulas are derived to calculate line throughput in one- and two-machine lines, and a convergent recursive algorithm is introduced for longer lines. The numerical results show that the method leads to a high accuracy in performance evaluation. Using such a model, bottleneck analysis has been carried out to identify the machine or product whose improvement will lead to the largest improvement in system throughput. Indicators based on the collected data to identify bottleneck machine and product are derived without complete calculation of the partial derivatives of system performance. Such efficient algorithms provide a quantitative tool for analysis and improvement of flexible manufacturing systems.

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