Question: Consider a three-station line with single-machine stations. The average processing times on stations 1, 2, 3 are 15, 12, and 14 minutes respectively. However, station 2 is subject to random failures, which causes it fraction of uptime (availability) to be only 75 percent.
a. Which station is the bottleneck of this line?
b. What are the bottleneck rate rb, raw process time T0, and critical WIP W0 for the line?
c. If the availability of station 2 is reduced to 50 percent, what happens to the critical WIP W0? Briefly describe the likely impacts of this change.