PERFORMANCE ANALYSIS OF SCHEDULING POLICIES IN REENTRANT MANUFACTURING SYSTEMS

Re-entrant lines are a class of non-traditional queueing network model s that are congenial for the modeling of manufacturing systems with di stinct multiple visits to work centers. Analyzing the performance of s cheduling policies in re-entrant lines is a problem of significant res earch interest. Reentrant lines are non-product form owing to priority scheduling, and all the existing performance studies have used simula tion for analysis. In this paper we present an approximate technique f or analytical performance prediction of re-entrant lines. The techniqu e is based on MVA (Mean Value Analysis). The running time of the algor ithm is linear in the product of the system population and the number of operations, which makes it overwhelmingly efficient compared to sim ulation. A detailed comparison of performance values obtained through simulation and the proposed technique shows that the analytical estima tes are quite accurate.