Performance analysis of Bernoulli serial production lines with switch-on/off machine control

In recent years, achieving high energy-efficiency has become one of the primary goals in manufacturing industries, along with maintaining high productivity and quality. In many manufacturing systems, it is sometimes possible to temporarily switch off a machine to reserve energy when it is idle and switch it back on when a certain condition is met. In this paper, we study serial production lines with Bernoulli machines and finite buffers and assume that one of the machines can be switched on and off during the production process according to a pre-determined control policy. Mathematical models for the system under consideration are derived and analytical methods are developed for calculating the system production rate, consumption rate, and power during transients and steady state. Specifically, exact Markovian analysis is used for two-and three-machine lines. For longer lines, an aggregation-based approximation approach is applied. Numerical experiments show that the methods developed can be used to efficiently calculate the systems performance with high accuracy.