A buffered three-station merge system: Performance analysis and comparative study

Abstract : The addressed paper deals with a merge production system which consists of two parallel machines in the first stage and one machine in the second one. The two stages are separated by a finite buffer and all the machines are unreliable. The processing rates of the machines are not necessary identical. Times of failures and times of repairs are assumed to be exponential. We present an analytical formulation to evaluate the system throughput. This formulation is based on the transformation of the original system to the simple linear model with two machines and one buffer presented by Ouazene et al. ([14], [12]). Two transformation techniques are used and compared. The first technique consists of replacing the parallel machines on the first stage by an equivalent machine. The second one consists of an overlapping decomposition approach which decomposes the original line into two serial lines. We present also a comparative study with existing model in literature based on different numerical experiments. The obtained results show the efficiency of the proposed model.