Modeling and Analysis of Re-entrant Production Systems

This paper presents a model and analysis of a reentrant production line with finite buffers and unreliable machines. Semiconductor device and liquid crystal display (LCD) fabrication processes are characterized as a re-entrant process, in which a similar sequence of processing step is repeated several times. The purpose of this paper is to present mathematical formulations and algorithms to analyze the material behavior of the re-entrant production system using the decomposition method. In developing equations for the two-machine building blocks for the re-entrant production line, we modify the existing decomposition model that has been created for the multiple-part type line.