Procedure to evaluate switching strategies for production lines with flexible workstations

This article is concerned with the study of production line systems with two flexible workstations and an intermediate buffer storage. Each station can perform two different operations. The setup time, defined as the time that a station takes to switch from one operation to another, is positive. We present a Markov chain model to determine the buffer levels at which the stations must change operations so the production rate is maximized. The large-scale system of steady-state equations is solved by a conjugate gradient method. A computational experiment is presented which shows how to analyze these types of production lines and how to determine optimal switching strategies.