MULTISTAGE FLOW LINE ANALYSIS WITH THE STOPPED ARRIVAL QUEUE MODEL

In a stopped arrival queue the arrival process is switched off as soon as the available queue space is full and not switched on again until there is space in the queue. A simple approximation for GI/GI/1/N stopped arrival queues is developed and shown to be remarkably accurate in predicting throughput. Because a two-stage flow line is equivalent to a stopped arrival queue, the GI/GI/1/N stopped arrival queue can be used as the building block for approximating the performance of multistage flow lines where the service times at the stages have general distributions. Numerical tests of the throughput approximation show that it gives accurate throughput predictions, in spite of its simplicity and minimal computation requirements.