Approximate analysis of a conveyor system

An approximate method for the performance analysis of a particular flexible manufacturing system with unreliable machines and a circular conveyor consisting of a fixed number of cells is presented. Workpieces are transported among the machines on the conveyor. The paper assumes that the time to failure and the time to repair are exponentially distributed. This analysis is based on the service completion time of the workstations, which leads to the finding of the system time. A decomposition method that analyses each workstation in isolation has been developed. The performance measures of the present interest include the mean system time, the mean number of workpieces in the system, the probability that a cell is occupied by a workpiece and the conveyor’s throughput. Experimental results show that the approximate method is highly accurate.