 Modeling and analysis of a mixed‐model assembly line with stochastic operation timesXiaobo Zhao, Jianyong Liu, Katsuhisa Ohno and Shigenori Kotani Naval Research Logistics (NRL), 2007, vol. 54, issue 6, 681-691 Abstract: We consider a mixed‐model assembly line (MMAL) comprised a set of workstations and a conveyor. The workstations are arranged in a serial configuration. The conveyor moves at a constant speed along the workstations. Initial units belonging to different models are successively fed onto the conveyor, and they are moved by the conveyor to pass through the workstations to gradually generate final products. All assembling tasks are manually performed with operation times to be stochastic. An important performance measure of MMALs is overload times that refer to uncompleted operations for operators within their work zones. This paper establishes a method to analyze the expected overload times for MMALs with stochastic operation times. The operation processes of operators form discrete time nonhomogeneous Markov processes with continuous state spaces. For a given daily production schedule, the expected overload times involve in analyzing the Markov processes for finite horizon. Based on some important properties of the performance measure, we propose an efficient approach for calculating the expected overload times. Numerical computations show that the results are very satisfactory. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2007 Date: 2007 Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wly:navres:v:54:y:2007:i:6:p:681-691 Access Statistics for this article More articles in Naval Research Logistics (NRL) from John Wiley & Sons |
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