Abstract
We consider the design of a large assembly line with approximately 50 machines, in particular the question where intermediate buffers are necessary, and what size these buffers should have. If in a production or assembly line without buffers one of the machines fails, within a few minutes all machines in front of it will be blocked, and the machines after the one that failed are going to starve. Depending on the failure frequencies and failure times this may lead to an enormous loss of production capacity for the entire system. For the case of 50 machines, where each of the machines is down 2% of the time, the capacity of the whole system may reduce to 36% of the capacity without failures. With infinite buffers the capacity remains 98%.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 1990 Springer-Verlag Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
van der Wal, J. (1990). On the Size of Buffers in an Assembly Line. In: Kistner, KP., Ahrens, J.H., Feichtinger, G., Minnemann, J., Streitferdt, L. (eds) Papers of the 18th Annual Meeting / Vorträge der 18. Jahrestagung. Operations Research Proceedings, vol 1989. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-75639-9_92
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-75639-9_92
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-52489-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-75639-9
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive