Minimum Required Local Storages of an Automated Assembly System

An optimal strategy for selection of the required local storages of the workstations and transporter stations of a finite capacity flexible assembly line system is presented while controlling the bottleneck problem. For this purpose, a mixed non-Markovian queueing network with infinite capacity nodes is presented to model its performance, a stochastic optimization model is provided and a heuristic algorithm is developed for solving it. Finally, an example is presented and the approximation results are compared with those from a simulation study.