ANALYSIS OF 2-STAGE TRANSFER-LINE PRODUCTION SYSTEM SUBJECT TO INTER-STAGE INSPECTION AND ARBITRARY ARRIVAL AND PROCESSING TIME DISTRIBUTIONS

The purpose of this paper is to study the transient and steady-state behaviour of a two-stage transfer-line production system subject to attribute type of instantaneous inter-stage inspection. A stochastic model is developed to describe the system and analytical expressions have been obtained for certain measures of performance with arbitrary distributions of arrival and processing time at both the stages of production by using the state-space method. The results obtained by Gopalan and Ramesh [Int. J. Management Syst. 4(1), 50-66 (1988)] and Gopalan and Anantharaman [Ind. Engng J. XIX(3), 17-23 (March, 1990)] have been shown to be particular cases