Bottlenecks with respect to due-time performance in pull serial production lines

Abstract

In this work, serial production lines with finished goods buffers operating in the pull regime are considered. The machines are assumed to obey Bernoulli reliability model. The problem of satisfying customers demand is addressed. The level of demand satisfaction is quantified by the due-time performance (DTP), which is defined as the probability to ship to the customer a required number of parts during a fixed time interval. Within this scenario, the definitions of DTP bottlenecks are introduced and a method for their identification is developed.