Closed-Loop Conveyor Systems with Breakdown and Repair of Unloading Stations

Abstract

We consider a closed-loop conveyor system having a single loading and multiple unloading stations. The belt of the conveyor moves continuously with a constant speed. Units to be transported on the conveyor system are homogeneous. Interarrival times of units at the loading station are independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) random variables having exponential distributions. The unloading station(s) are subject to breakdown. When an unloading station fails, ‘thesystem operates with the remaining unloading station(s) while the failed station is being repaired. When multiple unloading stations fail, each station is equally likely to be selected for repair. The service times of unloading stations, the time between failures, and the repair times of unloading stations are i.i.d, random variables having exponential distributions. A matrix-geometric solution is obtained which provides an approximation of the steady-state probabilities of the system being in different operating states. In particular, we study the 2-server conveyor systems under different repair policies where we present some numerical results and recommend repair policies for different system parameters.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 17 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.