Efficient Approach for Selecting the Best Subset of Buffer Profile

Abstract

One of the main problems with designing a production line is to find the optimal number of buffers between workstations in order to maximizes the throughput. This problem known as buffer allocation problem. Previous work in this problem focus on selecting a single buffer profile that has the maximum throughput. The objective in this paper would be to selecting from a large number of alternatives, the best subset of buffer profiles where its throughput are at its maximum. The ordinal optimization with optimal computing budget allocation approaches will be used to isolating the best subset of buffer profile, where its throughput is maximum, from the set of all alternatives. Numerical results show that the proposed algorithm finds the best subset of the puffer allocation with high probability and small replications numbers of samples.