A two-phase heuristic algorithm for determining buffer sizes of production lines

In-process inventories are often used in many manufacturing systems to smooth and balance work flow. The buffer design problem of determining the best size of storage space between operations (or workstations) is one that has been approached in past and current research issues. Although past research attempted to apply traditional optimization methods to the buffer design problems, the applications revealed that some fundamental drawbacks were occurring due to the unique characteristics of the buffer design in the production lines. This paper addresses the unique characteristics involved in the buffer design, discusses drawbacks of traditional optimization methods applied, and finally presents an efficient two-phase heuristic method using a dimension reduction strategy and a buffer utilization-based beam search method. In addition, numerical results show sensitivity analyses for the performance of the heuristic method with respect to parameters involved in the second phase of the method.