An approximation method for performance analysis of assembly/disassembly systems with parallel-machine stations

This note presents an efficient approximation method to evaluate the performance of tree-structured Assembly/Disassembly (AD) systems in which each station consists of multiple identical machines. It is assumed that the times to failure, times to repair, and processing times are exponentially distributed and the capacities of the buffers are finite. The method transforms an AD system with parallel machines in each station to an (approximately) equivalent AD system with a single machine in each station. After the transformation, a decomposition algorithm is used to analyze the performance of the transformed system. The results of computational experiments show that the suggested method gives good estimates in a short time.