ASSEMBLY DISASSEMBLY SYSTEMS - AN EFFICIENT DECOMPOSITION ALGORITHM FOR TREE-STRUCTURED NETWORKS

Assembly/Disassembly Networks are networks of queues in which assembly or disassembly (often called join or fork) take place. This paper describes and analyzes a class of these systems in which machines are unreliable, buffers are finite, machines perform operations whenever none of their upstream buffers are empty and none of their downstream buffers are full, and the network structure is a tree. These systems are difficult to evaluate because of their large state spaces and because they cannot be decomposed exactly. An efficient approximate decomposition method for the evaluation of performance measures is presented. This decomposition approach is based on such system characteristics as conservation of flow. Comparison with simulation results indicate that it is accurate.