Title

A Closed Queueing Network Approach To Analyzing Multi-Vehicle Material Handling Systems

Keywords

Finite buffer queueing networks; vehicle-based material handling

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. Copyright © 2011 IIE.

Publication Date

10-1-2011

Publication Title

IIE Transactions (Institute of Industrial Engineers)

Volume

43

Issue

10

Number of Pages

721-738

Document Type

Article

Personal Identifier

scopus

DOI Link

https://doi.org/10.1080/0740817X.2011.566907

Socpus ID

79960999433 (Scopus)

Source API URL

https://api.elsevier.com/content/abstract/scopus_id/79960999433

This document is currently not available here.

Share

COinS