The production rate of a two-stage system with stochastic processing times

Abstract

This paper extends the earlier papers of Rao (1975,1976) and Knott (1976) on the output rate of a two-stage production system with stochastic processing times and no buffer storage between the stages. Justifications for using different probability distributions to represent stochastic task times are examined, and convenient procedures are presented for computing the system's expected output rate for a large variety of processing times distributions, including some very versatile four-parameter probability distributions.