Determining the throughput of a CONWIP system using adjusted ARM

• Main Author: Hu, He
• Other Authors: Lee Ka Man, Carman
• Format: Theses and Dissertations
• Language: English
• Published: 2014
• Subjects: DRNTU::Engineering::Manufacturing
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/60516
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Intermediate Bulk Container (IBC) is widely used in pharmaceutical company to contain Work-In-Process product to avoid the products exposing to the air. It is important for the pharmaceutical company to determine the right number of IBCs to use to achieve the best tradeoff between the WIP level and the throughput of the system. In this thesis we applied the adjusted ARM (Approximate Regenerative Model) to estimate the throughput of a CONWIP system in the pharmaceutical company. By comparing the results from the original ARM and adjusted ARM with the simulation model, we conclude that the adjusted ARM performs better than the original ARM for our case. In addition, we also test the robustness of the adjusted ARM on two aspects, the violation of A1 assumption and the impacts brought by the limitation of buffer space before the bottleneck station.