ESTIMATING THE THROUGHPUT OF A CYCLIC ASSEMBLY SYSTEM

We consider a production system consisting of several fabrication line s feeding an assembly station. The machines in the fabrication lines a nd at assembly are assumed to have general processing time distributio ns. Releases to the system are governed by the CONWIP protocol. We mod el this system as an assembly-like queue and develop approximations fo r the throughput of the system. Comparisons with simulations show that this approximation is robust over a wide range of conditions. Finally , we observe that throughput tends to be higher when machines with hig her mean processing times and:or higher variances are in fabrication r ather than assembly.