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Throughput analysis is important for the design, operation and management of production systems. A substantial amount of research has been devoted to developing analytical methods to estimate the throughput of production systems with unreliable machines and finite buffers. In this paper we summarise the recent studies in this area. In addition to the performance evaluation of serial lines, approximation methods for more complex systems, such as assembly/disassembly systems, parallel lines, split and merge, closed-loop systems, etc., are discussed. Moreover, we propose future research topics from the automotive manufacturing systems perspective.
Li et al. (Mon,) studied this question.