Abstract
In this paper, lean buffering (i.e., the smallest level of buffering necessary and sufficient to ensure the desired production rate of a manufacturing system) is analyzed for the case of serial lines with machines having Weibull, gamma, and log-normal distributions of up- and downtime. The results obtained show that: (1) the lean level of buffering is not very sensitive to the type of up- and downtime distributions and depends mainly on their coefficients of variation, CV up and CV down; (2) the lean level of buffering is more sensitive to CV down than to CV up but the difference in sensitivities is not too large (typically, within 20%). Based on these observations, an empirical law for calculating the lean level of buffering as a function of machine efficiency, line efficiency, the number of machines in the system, and CV up and CV down is introduced. It leads to a reduction of lean buffering by a factor of up to 4, as compared with that calculated using the exponential assumption. It is conjectured that this empirical law holds for any unimodal distribution of up- and downtime, provided that CV up and CV down are less than 1.
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© 2006 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Enginarlar, E., Li, J., Meerkov, S.M. (2006). Lean buffering in serial production lines with non-exponential machines. In: Liberopoulos, G., Papadopoulos, C.T., Tan, B., Smith, J.M., Gershwin, S.B. (eds) Stochastic Modeling of Manufacturing Systems. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-29057-5_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-29057-5_2
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