A tabu search approach for buffer allocation in production lines with unreliable machines

The optimal allocation of buffers is an important research issue in designing production lines. In this study, a tabu search (TS) algorithm is proposed to find near-optimal buffer allocation plans for a serial production line with unreliable machines. The main objective is to maximize the production rate, i.e. throughput, of the line. The efficiency of the proposed method is also tested to solve buffer allocation problems with the objective of total buffer size minimization. To estimate the throughput of the line with a given specific buffer allocation, an analytical decomposition approximation method is used. The performance of the tabu search algorithm is demonstrated on existing benchmark problems. The results obtained by the TS algorithm are clearly encouraging, as the TS algorithm is much better than the other algorithms for all considered benchmark problems.