Reliability with finite buffer size for a multistate manufacturing system with parallel production lines

This study examines system reliability for a manufacturing system with parallel production lines by creating a model of a multistate manufacturing system (MMS). System reliability is defined as the probability of demand satisfaction, which reflects the probability that the current capacity state of the MMS can successfully process a given demand. In particular, a buffer station with a finite size is taken into consideration to avoid blockage and starvation in the MMS. To the best of our knowledge, there is no existing research that considers a finite buffer size in a model of an MMS with parallel production lines. This study proceeds through the following phases. (i) In the model construction phase, the amount of input material, workload, and minimal capacity required by each workstation to satisfy a given demand level are studied by flow analysis; subsequently, a buffer usage matrix (BUM) is proposed to calculate buffer reliability. (ii) In the performance evaluation phase, system reliabilities with both infinite and finite buffer sizes are derived in terms of both minimal capacity vector and buffer reliability. (iii) In the case demonstration phase, two examples are utilized to illustrate the proposed method. Results of both examples show that the system reliability is overestimated with an infinite buffer size.