Analysis of a production system in a general configuration

We consider a production system comprising multiple stations (or workshops) such as an entry station, a set of work stations, a central station, and an exit station, which are arranged in a general configuration. A worker (or a vehicle tool) is assigned to each station, who sends a part from the station to the destination station according to the required process path of the part. Any part is allowed to visit a work station more than once if its process path requires. We propose a new control strategy with the push policy for instructing each worker to send a part and the kanban mechanism for controlling the work‐in‐process (WIP) in each work station. As all work stations have limited local buffers, the central station is used for storing blocked parts temporarily. Such a production system is modeled as an open queueing network in a general configuration with a Markovian part sending policy and a machine no blocking mechanism. The queueing network is analytically characterized. Some important performance measures are compared with other control strategies. A semi‐open decomposition approach is applied to the queueing network for computing the blocking probabilities when parts arrive at the work stations. An algorithm is developed based on the semi‐open decomposition approach. Numerical experiments show the quality of the solutions obtained by the algorithm as well as a property of a performance measure. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 48: 128–143, 2001