Title

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

Authors

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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