SOME FURTHER RESULTS FOR CLOSED-LOOP CONTINUOUS CONVEYORS.

The authors have previously analyzed some characteristics of a closed-loop continuous conveyor with Poissonian input and negative exponential service time distributions at the workstations. The analysis investigated the influence of the recirculation time on the server utilizations and the mean flow time. As in many queueing systems the form of the service time distribution plays an important role, it is important to investigate how sensitive the earlier results are for changes in the form of these distributions. In this paper the same model is considered: i. e. (i) the arrivals constitute a homogeneous Poisson process with arrival rate lambda . (ii) an arriving or recirculated unit enters the idle server with lowest index. (iii) when all servers are busy the unit recirculates, with recirculation time T.