摘要：AbstractIn this paper, we develop a practical decision making tool to analyze and detect system bottlenecks for serial production lines with multiple Geometric machines and finite buffers. Systematic approaches are investigated to quantify the overall system performance-the production rate and its interactions with characteristics of individual machines. Two types of bottlenecks are defined and their corresponding indicators are derived to provide guidelines on improving system performance. These methods provide quantitative tools for modeling, analyzing, and improving manufacturing systems where machine’s downtime is significantly longer than the cycle time.
