A new modeling method for both transient and steady-state analyses of inhomogeneous assembly systems

Production system modeling (PSM) focuses on revealing the component-level principles of production procedures. Despite the extensive studies for PSM of serial production systems, assembly systems have received much less investigation. Among existing PSM researches on assembly lines, most are focused on the steady-state system performance, while the transient behavior of the inhomogeneous assembly systems is largely unexplored. This paper presents a new analytical PSM method for inhomogeneous assembly systems considering Bernoulli machines and finite buffers. By using the proposed ‘Split-View’ method, both transient and steady-state analyses of such systems can be performed. This model can be solved without using the traditional decomposition technique. The solvability of the established model has been proven theoretically. The sensitivity studies of system performance in both transient and steady states are numerically investigated. Numerical studies demonstrate the high accuracy of the method comparing with the simulation results.