Models of production lines with flexible workstations

This article presents models of production line systems with two flexible workstations. Flexible stations have the capability of switching from one operation to another when they become either blocked or starved. The objective is to determine and compare the production rates of serial and parallel arrangements of the workstations. It is shown that, in general, the serial arrangement achieves higher efficiency. Under some specific assumptions, however, both arrangements have the same production rate. An extension of the analysis of two stations to n stations for the parallel case is also presented.