Flexible Assembly and Shortest Queue Problems

Abstract

For the design of flexible assembly systems an iterative approach seems advisable. Such an approach would require the evaluation of several alternative designs. Therefore it is necessary that individual designs can be evaluated very efficiently. In this paper it is argued that extended shortest queue models can play an important role in designing flexible assembly systems. Consequently, it would be essential to have efficient methods to evaluate shortest queue models. The paper presents a new approach for shortest queue models and shows how this approach can be used for several variants. The approach uses mixtures of product forms as approximative solutions for the equilibrium distribution of the Markov chain. Although no rigorous proofs are presented in this paper, it is indicated that the exact solution can be approximated deliberately good in this way with the particular property that the approach also generates upper and lower bounds.

A Reversible Erlang Loss System With Multitype Customers and Multitype Servers

“…It again turns out that the assignment probabilities can be chosen so that this FCFS system will satisfy partial balance and have a product form stationary distribution. This topic was explored in [1,3,4,17] and finally resolved in [15,16]. Remarkably, it turns out that the assignment probabilities are exactly those derived here for the reversible loss system.…”

A skill based parallel service system under FCFS-ALIS — steady state, overloads, and abandonments

“…However, it should find as much use also to describe the flow of jobs in a manufacturing system with non-homogenous machines, skill based routing of calls to agents in a call center, wireless messages to ad hoc nodes, evaluation threads to computing processors, and so on. See in particular [6,7,9,11,24,25,26,30,32,37]. …”