OPERATING A FLEXIBLE ASSEMBLY-LINE - TO CONTROL THE BOTTLENECK

In this paper, to develop a loading strategy for optimal utilization o f a flexible assembly line system while controlling the bottleneck pro blem, the performance of the system is modeled by a non-Markovian queu eing network with finite capacity queueing nodes. A stochastic optimiz ation model is then presented to select the value of the maximum loadi ng rate such that the resulting probability of finding each workstatio n and each transporter station blocked (e.g., full) is sufficiently cl ose to zero, and a heuristic algorithm is developed to solve the propo sed optimization model. Finally an example is presented and the relati ve accuracy of the proposed algorithm is investigated through a simula tion study.