Analysis of Multiproduct Manufacturing Systems With Homogeneous Exponential Machines

This paper is devoted to modeling and analysis of multiproduct manufacturing systems with homogeneous exponential machines and finite buffers. In such systems, each machine processes multiple product types with different speeds, but the processing time for each product type is the same on all machines. Buffers are finite, shared for all products. Analytical methods to evaluate the system performance are developed, and system-theoretic properties are investigated. It is shown from numerical experiments that such a method has a high accuracy in performance evaluation. To improve the performance of such systems, bottleneck analysis is carried out to identify the machine and/or product whose improvement will lead to the largest improvement in system throughput.