Real-time Performance Evaluation of Assembly Systems With Three Bernoulli Machines and Finite Production Runs

Steady state analysis of production, which is usually applicable to large-volume manufacturing systems, has been extensively studied during the past several decades. However, when the volume of the production is relatively small (e.g., finite production run-based operation with small run sizes), transient may play a major role during the production process and steady state analysis may become inapplicable. A few preliminary results have been derived for analyzing serial lines with finite production runs in recent years. Since assembly systems are also widely used in practice, where the final product requires several components, under the framework of finite production run-based assembly systems with finite buffers and with three machines having the Bernoulli reliability model, the problem of performance evaluation of such systems is investigated in this paper. Specifically, a mathematical model and analytical formulas to evaluate performances of the system are derived first. Then, a decomposition-based algorithm for performance approximation is also proposed and formulas for estimating the transient performance are derived. The accuracy of the algorithm is validated by numerical experiments and demonstrated by a numerical example. Copyright © 2019 Acta Automatica Sinica. All rights reserved.