Queueing Network Models For Intelligent Manufacturing Units With Dual- Resource Constraints

Performance evaluation is critical for the design, planning and optimization in manufacturing systems. Accurate estimates of throughput rates and cycle time are particularly important for enterprises that pro-viding customized products. A manufacturing system is an integrated system that couples material pro-cessing and material handling interdependently. There are a few studies on the performance modeling of such integrated systems, but most of them assume infinite queues. An intelligent manufacturing unit with an industrial robot for material handling is considered and modeled as an open queueing network with finite buffers, general service times, and arbitrary job routing. To deal with the dual-resource con-straints (DRC) of material processing and material handling, a performance evaluation method is pro-posed to calculate the system throughput, WIP and cycle time. The accuracy and effectiveness of the proposed method are demonstrated by comparing the results with simulations from numerical experi-ments. Numerous facility design and sensitivity analyses are performed to provide valuable insights about system design, analysis, and resource planning. (C) 2021 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.