tandem queues production systems with base stocks
We consider a production system that can be modeled by a two-station tandem queues. Products requested by demands have to go through station 1 then station 2 for processing; however, in order to reduce the response time, we may stock some semi-finished products called base stock at station 1 or finished products at station 2. For the underlying queueing system, we may have a queue after each station in additional to the queue in front of it, hence there are four different configurations. In this study, we approximate the distribution of response time for each configuration and, under some operating cost structure we can determine the configuration having the minimal total cost.
tandem queue production system base stock response time