DT-bottlenecks in serial production lines: theory and application

The bottleneck (BN) of a production line is a machine that impedes the system's performance in the strongest manner. It has been shown in previous work that the so-called downtime bottlenecks (DT-BNs) are of main industrial importance. In this paper, a method for DT-BN identification is developed in the framework of serial production lines with unreliable (Markovian) machines and finite buffers. The identification tool derived is based on the probabilities of machine blockages and starvations. To evaluate these probabilities, a novel aggregation technique is proposed. The results obtained are applied to the design of a production line at an automotive component plant.