Performance approximation and bottleneck identification in re-entrant lines

In this paper, we study a re-entrant line with unreliable exponential machines and finite buffers, operating under last buffer first serve scheduling policy. First, an approximation method is presented to estimate the throughput of the re-entrant line. Then, a system approach to identify bottleneck based on blockage and starvation information is proposed. It has been shown that the approximation method results in acceptable accuracy, and the bottleneck identification method could correctly detect the bottleneck in most cases.