ABSTRACT
Many approaches exist to control the resource dispatching sequences in manufacturing systems, including first-in-first-out (FIFO), first-buffer-first-serve (FBFS), last-buffer-first-serve (LBFS), earliest-due-date (EDD), least-slack (LS), and others [Panwalkar et al 77]. Rigorous analysis for some of these algorithms has been done for the case of unbounded buffer lengths. For instance, [Kumar et al. 92-95] has shown that LBFS yields bounded buffer stability in the case of a single part reentrant flow-line (RF), However, in actual manufacturing systems, the buffer lengths are usually finite, which introduces the possibility of system deadlock. Moreover, little rigorous work has been done for dispatching in multi part RF (MRF) with finite buffers. In this chapter we provide a technique for avoiding deadlock in MRF with finite buffers by restricting the WIP in certain critical subsystems related to siphon structures. This is a rigorous notion related to the idea of ‘CONWIP’ [Spearman et al. 90]. All computations are performed us ing straightforward matrix algorithms, including computation of the critical sub systems, for any RFL in a certain general class.
