Article ID: | iaor19911924 |
Country: | Netherlands |
Volume: | 2 |
Start Page Number: | 63 |
End Page Number: | 86 |
Publication Date: | Jan 1990 |
Journal: | International Journal of Flexible Manufacturing Systems |
Authors: | Jafari Mohsen A. |
The paper considers a flexible manufacturing system with a number of workstations, a single material transporter, and a common storage space of finite capacity. The material handling delay times are explicitly considered in the model and assumed to follow a two-stage Coxian distribution. The material processing times on a workstation also have a two-stage Coxian distribution. The routing of parts within the system follows a Markov chain. An approximate performance model is developed and the results are compared with the exact or simulation results. The paper also investigates how this performance model compares to a simulation with deterministic routing and processing times. Finally, it studies the effect, on the performance measures, of ignoring the material transporter or of modeling the transporter as a central server with aggregation of routing information.