Operating a flexible assembly line: To control the bottleneck

In this paper, to develop a loading strategy for optimal utilization of a flexible assembly line system while controlling the bottleneck problem, the performance of the system is modeled by a non-Markovian queueing network with finite capacity queueing nodes. A stochastic optimization model is then presented to select the value of the maximum loading rate such that the resulting probability of finding each workstation and each transporter station blocked (e.g., full) is sufficiently close to zero, and a heuristic algorithm is developed to solve the proposed optimization model. Finally an example is presented and the relative accuracy of the proposed algorithm is investigated through a simulation study.