The Productivity of Machines Requiring Attention at Random Intervals

Summary In many industrial processes an operative attends a number of machines which stop from time to time. Each time a machine stops the operative has to do a certain amount of work before it can be restarted. If at any time two or more machines are stopped simultaneously, there will be a loss of production due to the period the machines have to wait for attention. In this paper we derive methods of estimating this loss of production when the operative has no duties away from the machines and discuss modifications to the theory when the operative has other duties.