Production rate estimated with flow-shop reversibility

Queueing theory is employed to analyze production rates for flow-shops in which every job visits every machine group and a limited queue size between machine groups is allowable. Machine groups are assumed to consist of a single server having variable processing time or of a number of parallel servers each having the same constant processing time. The analysis shows that the production rate is invariant if the order of the machine groups in the flow-shop is reversed; this reversibility property provides a highly accurate production rate estimation when statistical simulation is used for rate computations, or when the flow-shop is represented by a Markovian model.