Availability and throughput of unreliable, unbuffered production lines with non-homogeneous deterministic processing times

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Abstract
This paper studies production lines composed of several serial machines which are subject to random operation-dependent failures. The production lines have no intermediate buffers between adjacent machines. Machines have different deterministic processing times. The purpose of this paper is to propose analytical models to assess steady-state availability and throughput of such lines. Thousands of production line configurations have been experimented to compare the performance of the proposed approach to approximate existing techniques. A general simulation model was developed and statistical tests carried out to prove that the proposed approach is exact and robust to model unreliable, unbuffered, and non-homogeneous production lines.

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