The transient behaviour of transfer lines with buffer inventories Journal Articles

The transfer line models in the literature are planning models rather than operational models. That is, they are very useful for planning or designing the transfer line, but are less useful for controlling daily operations of the line. The performance measure, used in these models is the expected efficiency of the line. In this paper a method is presented for calculating the variance of the efficiency of the line. These two performance measures can be used to construct a confidence interval for the expected production during a specified time interval (say, a shift) . This confidence interval is an operational guide for the production manager.