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 cause its fraction of uptime (availability) to be only 75 percent.
(a) What are the throughput rate, the a?ow time, and the average WIP for the line?
(b) If availability of station 2 is reduced to 50 percent, what happens to the WIP ?