Optimal buffer storage allocation in balanced reliable production lines

This work deals with the buffer allocation problem in balanced production lines. The workstations of the lines consist of single machines which are assumed to be perfectly reliable, i.e., they don't break down. The processing times follow the exponential or Erlang-k (k = 2,3,4) distribution. The paper presents two basic design rules that were extracted for the optimal buffer allocation in these types of lines using enumeration. We have developed a search technique that gives the optimal buffer allocation very rapidly. This is a modified Hooke–Jeeves search algorithm that exploits the two design rules to give an initial buffer allocation close to the optimal one. The rules are exploited via the use of the proposed Allocation Routine. The latter was found to give the optimal solution in almost all cases examined in this study.