Buffer allocation in a flow shop with capacitated batch transports

Abstract

Automated material handling systems play a crucial role in intelligent manufacturing workshops. The main difficulty in optimising buffer allocation in such systems is to provide good evaluation for the performance measures of interest, such as throughput, and cycle time, for customised manufacturing systems. However, existing research lacks an in-depth consideration of the integration of production and material handling systems. Therefore, a flow shop with capacitated batch transports, where the transported batch size depends on the number of jobs in buffers and capacity of transporters, is presented. The system is modelled as an open queueing network with blocking, and an approximation method is proposed for computing the performance measures. Then, an iterative optimisation algorithm embedded with the performance evaluation method is developed to determine an optimal buffer allocation. Finally, the computational experiments are conducted to validate the accuracy and efficiency of the proposed approaches.

Keywords:

• Buffer allocation
• performance measurement
• queueing
• non-linear programming

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was partially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [grant number 51805096], [grant number 51775120], [grant number 61973089] and [grant number 71802055]; and the Guangdong Natural Science Foundation of China [grant number 2018A030313477].