Analysis of two-machine lines with multiple failure modes

This paper presents an analytical method for evaluating the performance of production lines with a finite buffer and two unreliable machines. Unlike in earlier papers, each machine can fail in more than one way. For each failure mode, geometrically distributed times to failure and times to repair are specified. The method evaluates the steady-state probabilities of the states of the system with a computational effort that depends only on the number of failure modes considered and not on the capacity of the buffer. A comparison of performance of the method with those obtained with existing techniques that consider only one failure mode is reported.