Analysis of Erlang transfer lines

Transfer lines are widely used in the modeling and analysis of complex production systems. The literature is mostly devoted to the analysis of transfer lines with exponential processing times. However, most of the time a part is |)rocessed through stages(phases) of exponential processing times. It is possil)le to model such systems by means of processing times that are A,·—Erlang distributed. In the modeling and solution of these systems, significant difficulties arise due to the nature of the problem. In this thesis, we propose a -Markov model for transfer lines consisting of n reliable machines with A—Erlang processing times and finite buffers. The arrivals to the system is Poisson distributed. A program coded in C which is capable of solving the Markov model of a three machine transfer line is also developed. Besides the commonly used performance measures, such as utilization of the machines, mean throughput, mean WIP level, we calculate the variance of VVIP so that it is possible to construct confidence intervals.