Performance evaluation of production lines with unreliable buffer

This paper presents an approximate analytical method for the performance evaluation of a production line with multiple failure modes and unreliable buffer. A solution to a class of problems where a discrete material manufacturing system consisting of two machines that is subject to breakdown with multiple failure modes and one unreliable buffer was presented. This paper considers the machines with two failure modes, but the method can be extended to the case of more than two failure modes. The proposed method is based on the approximate evaluation of the performance of two-machine lines with multiple failure modes in [1]. An algorithm has been developed and the validation of the method has been carried out by means of testing and comparison with simulation.