A Model for Predicting the Performance of a Job Shop

This paper is concerned with presenting a method of modelling a job shop based on queueing theory. The model is very flexible and may be used to explore the relationships between the resources available in the shop (numbers and characteristics of machines, manpower levels and skills), the workload in the shop, the mode of operation of the shop (labour allocation and priority schemes) and the resulting level of congestion within the shop.A range of results is presented, based on the application of the model to a real environment, where good agreement with the observed performance was obtained.