Availability of three-machine two-buffer systems

Abstract

The flow-shop studied consists of three machines arranged in series through which material must pass. Each machine is subject to failure and, to improve the overall availability of the system, buffer storages are located between each pair of subsequent machines. Analytical approaches address to the formulation of a system of balance equations describing the transition of the system state. The numberof states is quite high. An approximation is formulated in case the time to failure and time to repair is exponentially distributed. A simulation is built for this system to evaluate the validity of the approximation.