Analysis of production completion time in Bernoulli serial lines with finite buffers

Batch/lot-based production operations are widely used in various manufacturing systems. In these production activities, the main performance measure is the time needed to produce a given amount of parts. However, due to the finite size of a batch/lot, these production activities are operated partially (or entirely) in the transient regime, and, therefore, steady state analysis of such systems is, strictly speaking, not applicable. In this work, using transient analysis, we study the production completion time in serial production lines with machines having Bernoulli reliability model and with buffers having finite capacity. An analytical approximation procedure based on recursive aggregation is developed to evaluate the performance measures of interest. Based on these approximations and simulations, important system structural properties are also investigated.