Analysis of queue-size behaviour and throughput of a system with buffer controlled by a rope and production speed controlled by a drum

The original contribution of the paper is the consideration a flow shop system with setup and closedown times of a critical machine. In addition, the critical machine suffers from random failures. In the paper various concepts of increasing throughput by adjusting the bottleneck buffer by a rope and controlling speed of production by a drum are presented according to the Drum-Buffer-Rope (DBR) concept. Various capacities of the machine tied to the rope are given. The case of the production process that must be suspended when the buffer reaches the limit, should be avoided. Similarly, the case of the production process which a machine is not effectively used and needs to be stopped, is not desirable. The objective of the paper is to analyze the impact of the burstiness of input data on the DBR system performance. A sufficient size of the constraint buffer to protect the bottleneck against processing time variations and system disturbances is established.