Performance Evaluation of a Reconfigurable Production Line

This paper presents an analytical method for evaluating the throughput of a production line composed of two reconfigurable machines separated by a finite capacity buffer. This means that each machine is composed of essential and non essential equipment. The failure of any essential equipment induces the shutdown of the entire machine. The failure of the non essential equipment implies the continuity of the machine service with a reduced level of functionality. To assess the accuracy of the proposed method, simulation and numerical experiments have been conducted. The proposed model can be used as the building block for performance evaluation of longer production lines using either decomposition or aggregation techniques.