A building block for the decomposition analysis of production lines with restart policy

The paper presents a method for the performance evaluation of long lines with machines controlled by a restart policy. The restart policy, typical of packaging lines in the food and beverage industry, aims to reduce the occurrence of blocking events on critical machines: when any critical machine gets blocked sinceits downstream buffer is full, it is prevented from resuming production until the buffer is once again empty.First, an analytical model for a building block with restart policy and multiple failure modes is developed and its solution derived. Then, the paper shows how the new model can be included in a decomposition technique based on a multiple failure approach. Some validation results are also provided for three-machine two-buffer lines with a restart policy on the first machine.