Two-Link Material Handling Systems

This paper considers the steady-state behavior of two-link material handling systems with intermediate storage. Round trip times for carriers in either link are assumed to be random variables. We require the mean rate of flow through the system and the mean number of carriers waiting. Systems with a single carrier in the first link are considered initially, and the desired quantities are found by solving a set of simple linear equations. Since the number of equations increases with the number of carriers in the system, an approximation is examined for systems with a large number of carriers. Finally similar methods are seen to be appropriate for analyzing systems with several carriers in the first link provided the trip times are exponentially distributed.