BUS606: Operations and Supply Chain Management

This paper studied the effect of unbalancing buffer capacity with different levels of unreliability, various MTTF and MTTR lengths, and varying inventory-related costs through the simulation of merging lines with different number of stations and average buffer sizes. Experimental results suggest that shorter, more unreliable lines have higher TR with an ascending buffer allocation; whereas longer, more reliable lines have higher TR with a balanced pattern. Moreover, shorter, highly unreliable merging lines with longer MTTF and MTTR were found to be highly penalised by inventory-related costs. In addition, when compared with unreliable settings, reliable merging lines were found to profit the least from buffer capacity investments, as only environments with very low investment/maintenance costs would benefit from increasing buffer capacity in reliable scenarios.