Performance evaluation of single and multi-class production systems using an approximating queuing network.

Performance evaluation, and in particular cycle time estimation, is critical to optimise production plans in high-tech manufacturing industries. This paper develops a new aggregation model based on queuing network, so-called queue-based aggregation (QAG) model, to estimate the cycle time in a production system. Multiple workstations in serial and job-shop configurations are aggregated into a single-step workstation. The parameters of the aggregated workstation are approximated based on the parameters of the original workstations. Numerical experiments indicate that the proposed QAG model is computationally efficient and yields fairly accurate results when compared to other aggregation approaches in the literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]