Availability Analysis and Evaluation of Flexible Supply Chain System Services Based on Response Time

How to analyze and evaluate service availability of flexible supply chain system based on response time effectively is a challenging problem for investigators. To the best of our knowledge, analytical modeling has been mainly used for availability evaluation. However, less attention has been devoted to the analysis and evaluation of service due to long response time especially from the user perceived perspective. In this paper, we provide a simple analytical modeling approach to calculate the service availability in flexible supply chain system due to long response time according to Markov reward models and queueing theory firstly. Secondly, we achieved the closed equation of the service availability due to long response time in flexible supply chain system according to the queuening theory. Finally, according to the results we achieved, we make an elaborate analysis and evaluation of the service availability in this system. The results achieved from this paper can help designers find the right tradeoffs for achieving availability of users expected while providing acceptable levels of performance.