A three-station merge system with unreliable stations and a shared buffer (Q5936778)

The paper considers a production system that consists of two stages and the inter-stage buffer of a finite capacity. There are two stations working in parallel in the first stage and one station in the second stage. The stations have different processing rates and are subject to breakdowns. If the buffer is partially full, it is assumed that the times for station failures and for their repairs are exponentially distributed. For this case the system is modelled by a number of the steady-state differential equations that are solved subject to some boundary constraints. In the marginal cases (the buffer is empty or the buffer is full) no specific assumptions are made regarding the mentioned distributions. These extreme cases are treated by studying the corresponding transitions and their probabilities. Numerical results for a specific process are presented.