STOCHASTIC-ANALYSIS OF MACHINE INTERFERENCE OF A PRODUCTION SYSTEM WITH IDENTICAL MACHINES

This paper examines the transient and steady-state interference characteristics of a production system with one operator and n identical, semi-automatic and reliable machines. A stochastic model is developed to describe the system and analytical expressions for the percentage interference and mean output rate per machine with arbitrary distribution of concurrent time and exponential distribution of processing time of each machine, have been obtained by using a state-space method and the regeneration point technique. A particular case is investigated and numerical results are presented illustrating some features of this machine interference problem.