An approximation method for line production rate of a serial production line with a common buffer (Q1104234)

A serial, synchronized, and multistage production line with a finite common buffer storage is considered. The capacity of the common buffer storage is shared among all stages. It is assumed that every stage has a geometric distribution of up cycles. When an arriving customer can enter this line if space is available, the independent balance does not hold because of blocking. Since it is necessary to solve a large scale system of simultaneous linear equations to obtain the exact solution of the steady state output rate of the line without independent balance, we propose an efficient method to obtain a good approximate solution. The method is compared with exact solutions or computer simulations, and found to be reasonably accurate.