Analysis of two-machine lines with finite buffer, operation-dependent and time-dependent failure modes

Abstract

An analytical model for evaluating the throughput of two-machine lines, characterised by intermediate buffer with finite capacity, deterministic processing times and multiple failure modes for each machine is presented in this paper. Both operation-dependent failure and time-dependent failure are captured in a unique model as extension of the existing literature that was dealing with either one of them. Each machine has two failure modes, one is operation-dependent and the other is time-dependent. Time to failure and time to repair are assumed to be geometrically distributed. The presented method calculates the steady-state probabilities of the manufacturing system with a computational effort that depends only on the number of failure modes and not on the buffer capacity. A performance comparison of the proposed model with existing techniques is also reported, the aim is to show the error introduced by an analytical model that considers the operation-dependent failure mode as approximation of the time-dependent one.

Keywords:

• transfer line
• markov chain
• time-dependent failures
• operation-dependent failures

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank the anonymous reviewers for their fruitful comments which substantially contributed to the improvement of the paper.

Notes

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.