Analysis of transient throughput rates of transfer lines with pull systems

Abstract

Transfer lines represent the basic manufacturing system of many high volume production systems. Analysis and understanding of transfer lines are of great importance to improve design and operation performance of many manufacturing systems. Majority of research on the throughput of transfer lines concentrate on the steady state results. Due to the changes in manufacturing environment and increasing importance of JIT and pull systems, many transfer lines now have to changeover to different parts’ production quickly, probably most of the time, before enough time passes to reach steady state for a specific configuration. In such situations, steady state may never be reached and hence results relating to the steady state do not make sense. In these situations, one would be more interested in transient behavior of the system. In this study, we offer a novel analytical model for transient throughput analysis of transfer lines. Defining throughput as the number of units produced by a transfer line with buffers per unit time, this chapter shows how to calculate mean and variance of and interval estimates for throughput for a pull type transfer line. Derivation of distribution of transient throughput of transfer lines is presented and sample calculations are provided.