In this paper, using the bivariate characterizations of the reversed hazard rate ordering and the stochastic ordering, and the pairwise interchange argument, the authors characterize the ‘best’ strategy for allocating servers in a tandem system controlled using the general blocking or the production authorization card schemes. They show that when there is no buffer space between the first (resp. the last) two servers, it is ‘better’ to allocate the ‘slower’ server to the first (resp. the last) stage. The result extends previous results to systems where the number of buffers at the interior stages may be greater than one and the blocking mechanism may be more general. In particular, the present results apply to manufacturing blocking, kanban blocking, a variation of kanban blocking, and the integral control scheme previously studied in the literature.
