Cellular Production Lines With Asymptotically Reliable Bernoulli Machines: Lead Time Analysis and Control

Cellular lines are production systems consisting of cells comprised of machines performing similar operations. These systems are notorious for having excessively long lead time (LT) that are often an order of magnitude longer than the total processing time by all machines in the system. The main goal of this paper is to carry out an analytical investigation of this phenomenon and offer methods for its alleviation. To accomplish this, we develop a technique for performance evaluation of cellular lines with asymptotically reliable Bernoulli machines and use it for analysis and control of LT.