A new approach for buffer allocation in unreliable production lines

In this article, we describe a new local search approach for solving the buffer allocation problem in unreliable production lines. In this problem, we need to determine near optimal buffer allocation plans in large production lines and the objective is to maximize the average throughput. An analytical decomposition-type approximation is used to estimate the production line throughput. The proposed approach allows the allocation plan to be calculated subject to a given amount of total buffers slots in a computationally efficient way. Within an acceptable amount of time, our algorithm produced better results than simulated annealing for existing benchmark problems. (c) 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.