Throughput for production lines with serial work stations and parallel service facilities

Unpaced serial production lines with parallel service facilities are examined in order to determine how their output rates may be improved through the manipulation of various design variables, such as the allocation of facilities to stations, allocation of workload to stations, and placement of buffers between stations. The knowledge gained through many empirical investigations is utilized to make observations and to formulate conjectures about the output maximizing configurations for production lines which have multiple service facilities and finite buffers at each of several work stations in series. These results provide new insights that could be used in equipment acquisition decisions that need to be made during the design of manufacturing systems. Comparisons to recent related results are provided.