Traffic allocation for manufacturing systems

In this paper we present a methodology for an important manufacturing system design issue: policies for allocating incoming traffic of products over machines in a manufacturing system. The manufacturing system considered consists of a set of parallel heterogeneous machines. The traffic is allocated in such a way that the average queueing time of the products is minimal. The machines are modelled by means of a GI/G/1 queueing system. This makes the allocation policies applicable to a general class of manufacturing systems. We present numerical results on four manufacturing systems, showing both that the proposed methodology is asymptotically exact and that the presented GI/G/1 allocation policy outperforms two other known allocation policies.