K.L.Narasimhamu¹, V.Venugopal Reddy² and C.S.P.Rao³, ¹AITS, India, ²JNTUCE, India and ³NIT-Warangal, India

Buffer Allocation Problem is an important research issue in manufacturing system design. Objective of this paper is to find optimum buffer allocation for closed queuing network with multi servers at each node. Sum of buffers in closed queuing network is constant. Attempt is made to find optimum number of pallets required to maximize throughput of manufacturing system which has pre specified space for allocating pallets. Expanded Mean Value Analysis is used to evaluate the performance of closed queuing network. Particle Swarm Optimization is used as generative technique to optimize the buffer allocation. Numerical experiments are shown to explain effectiveness of procedure.

Buffer Allocation Problem, Closed Queuing Network, Expanded Mean Value Analysis, Particle Swarm Optimization