A station model for continuous materials flow production systems

Abstract

This study develops a station model for continuous flow production systems. The most prominent use of the model is as a building block for a general and flexible decomposition method to analyse and design continuous materials flow production systems. Station breakdown and a finite capacity buffer are considered. Station inference caused by the blocking and starving phenomena is included in the station model. We assume that the time to station breakdown and station repair are exponentially distributed while the buffer is neither empty nor full. No restrictive assumptions are made about the distributions of the station breakdown and repair times when the station is blocked or starved, that is, while the buffer remains empty or remains full. The production rate and the expected level of the buffer are given in closed form. Numerical results that show the effects of the input parameters on the production rate along with an overview of the decomposition methods are presented.