The authors extend the ‘line reversibility’ property to a serial production system controlled using the ‘general blocking’ scheme. The control mechanism is characterized by three vectors of integer parameters (a,b,k) which are, respectively, control parameters for the number of raw jobs, finished jobs, and buffer positions at each stage. The authors establish conditions under which the time to process a given set of jobs in a system does not change when the control parameters are in the reversed order. For cases where reversibility does not hold. they introduce a more restrictive form of reversibility-referred to as ‘semi-reversibility-and establish conditions under which the property holds. The present results imply reversibility of the kanban system and provide an alternative proof for previous results established for the communication and the manufacturing blockings. The approach is simple and readily extends to closed systems where the number of jobs in the system is kept constant. Finally, the authors show, via an example, that in general reversibility does not prevail for this blocking mechanism.
