An analytic formula for the mean throughput of K-station production lines with no intermediate buffers

Using the holding time model method, an approximate analytic formula is derived for calculating the average throughput of a K-station production line with exponential service times, manufacturing blocking and no intermediate buffers between adjacent stations. The usefulness of the proposed analytical formula relies on the fact that it can handle the (general) case of workstations with different mean processing times – this being the contribution of this work compared against that of Alkaff and Muth – provided a good estimation of some coefficients involved is being made. By doing this for the balanced lines case, a simple formula is proposed with very good numerical results.