AN OPTIMAL CONCURRENT DESIGN AND LOADING STRATEGY FOR A FLEXIBLE ASSEMBLY-LINE SYSTEM - TO CONTROL THE BOTTLENECK

In this paper, an optimal strategy is presented at the design stage for selection of the required local storages of the workstations and the transporter stations of a finite capacity flexible assembly line system, such that the throughput rate from the system is maximised while controlling the bottleneck problem. For this purpose, a mixed non-Markovian queueing network model is presented to model its performance, a stochastic optimisation model is provided to maximise its throughput rate, and a heuristic algorithm is developed for solving it. Finally, an example is presented and the approximation results are compared against those from a simulation study.