A decision support system for the design of unpaced production lines

SUMMARY Consider a realistic unpaced-line problem: there is a set of discrete tasks, whose task-time distributions have diverse shapes. The line designer must (i) decide to which work station to assign each task, and (ii) specify the size of each buffer area in such a way that the configuration has the ‘best’ operating characteristics. This paper describes a decision support package that can efficiently generate the operating characteristics of the many alternative line designs which the line designer may want to try. We also show that the package can be conveniently used to extend earlier results in theoretical unpaced-line research.