Transient Analysis of Geometric Serial Lines With Perishable Intermediate Products

Perishable intermediate products are commonly seen in practical manufacturing systems, where the time that intermediate products spend in a buffer is limited by a certain number. Parts have to be scrapped if their maximum allowed time is exceeded. In order to reduce the scrap ratio and optimize the production operation in a timely manner, the transient behavior of the system needs to be investigated to evaluate and predict the system performance at any time instance. In this paper, we develop a Markov chain model to analyze the transient behaviors of a two-machine geometric production system accounting for scrap due to the perishability of intermediate products. The analytical formulas are derived to evaluate transient performance. Compared with simulation, it is shown that the proposed method could estimate the system's transient performance with high accuracy.