Analysis of approximately balanced production lines

This paper develops two analytical formulas for estimating the throughput of a reliable production line with exponential service times and finite intermediate buffers. The formulas apply in the case of an approximately balanced line with identical buffers or near optimal buffer allocations, where the processing times of the machines are close to each other but not necessarily the same. The derivation of the formulas is based on the standard decomposition method. Moreover, it is proved that, in general cases, both formulas provide upper bounds for the throughput obtained by the decomposition method. Numerical experiments show that the proposed formulas achieve good accuracy for approximately balanced production lines. Finally, the formulas are applied to the buffer allocation problem, and two closed-form expressions are obtained for estimating the smallest buffer capacity which is necessary to achieve the desired throughput.