Availability and Unloading Capacity Assessment of Multi-state Material Handling System, Operate in a Stochastic Environment and Material Handling Stochastic Demand

Abstract

We present availability and unloading capacity assessment of multi-state material handling system, operate in a stochastic environment and investigate an impact of stochastic demands for material handling. In order to determine the system availability and unloading capacity we constructed Markov models, representing the various unloading capacity levels of each element and sub-system in the Material Handling System. The entire system can be represented as Markov model with 96 different states expressing the different performance levels of the entire process. The stochastic demands for material handling is described as three level Markov model, typical for such environment. The entire Markov model is described as system with 288 differential equations, solution of which is complicated problem. To overcome this obstacle we propose an application of the Lz-transform method for availability and unloading capacity assessment of multi-state Material Handling System (MSMHS). We demonstrated that the suggested method can be implemented in engineering decision making and construction of various MSS systems related to requirements, unloading capacity and production processes.