Efficient flow control of jobs in assembly lines

This paper addresses the issues of efficient flow control techniques for jobs in assembly lines. We propose a queuing theoretic approach for efficient flow control of jobs. An assembly line performance measure (ALPM) is used as the measure of performance for each assembly line and is defined as the ratio of throughput to total average delay of an assembly line (AL). A performance product criterion (PPC) is used as the performance measure of a cluster of ALs. It is shown that the performance product criterion has a unique maximum in throughput space. Two algorithms are presented to find the maximum of the performance product criterion in two different cases of assembly line environment. In the first algorithm, we attempt to maximize the performance product criterion with respect to the throughputs of the assembly lines in the entire throughput space. The second algorithm maximizes the performance product criterion when the sum of the throughputs of the ALs is fixed. Numerical examples are given as illustrations of the algorithms.