ABSTRACT
A new approach to model failure-prone FMS is by first decomposing it into a group of closed-loop production lines. To evaluate this approach, the decomposition method of Frein et al (1996) was extended to incorporate failures with repair times having a generalized exponential distribution. It combined and then extended the work of Dallery et al (1988, 1989), Frein et al (1996), and Dallery and Bihan (1999). The FMS was treated here as a group of disaggregated non-homogeneous closed-loop production lines. Each non-homogeneous closed-loop production line was analyzed and subsequently results obtained from them were aggregated to give performance parameters of the FMS. A simulation study was done to validate the results.
