Production Rate Estimated with Flow-Shop Reversibility

Abstract

A flow-shop has K machine groups in tandem, where the k-th machine group consists of a single server having variable processing-time, or of m_k parallel servers, each having the same constant processing-time. The allowable queue sizes in front of all machine groups except the first may be arbitrary. We prove the reversibility of the production rate in the model. And we propose a new technique using this property to estimate the production rate precisely by some numerical methods.