A closed queueing network approach to analyzing multi-vehicle material handling systems

    Authors

    D. Nazzal

    Comments

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    Abbreviated Journal Title

    IIE Trans.

    Keywords

    Finite buffer queueing networks; vehicle-based material handling; CONNECTING TRANSPORT AMHS; GUIDED VEHICLE SYSTEMS; FINITE BUFFERS; ANALYTIC MODEL; WAITING-TIMES; SINGLE-DEVICE; WAFER FAB; DESIGN; LOOP; PERFORMANCE; Engineering, Industrial; Operations Research & Management Science

    Abstract

    This article models a multi-vehicle material handling system as a closed-loop queueing network with finite buffers and general service times, where the vehicles represent the jobs in the network. This type of network differs from other queueing systems, because the vehicles' residence times on track segments (servers) depend on the number of jobs (vehicles) in circulation. A new iterative approximation algorithm is presented that estimates throughput capacity and decomposes the network consisting of S servers into S separate G/G/1 systems. Each subsystem is analyzed separately to estimate the work-in-process via a population constraint to ensure that the summation of the average buffer sizes across all servers equals the total number of vehicles. Numerical results show that the methodology proposed is accurate in a wide range of operating scenarios.

    Journal Title

    Iie Transactions

    Volume

    43

    Issue/Number

    10

    Publication Date

    1-1-2011

    Document Type

    Article

    Language

    English

    First Page

    721

    Last Page

    738

    WOS Identifier

    WOS:000299475600003

    ISSN

    0740-817X

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