Simple product form bounds for flexible manufacturing systems

At present it is commonly known that flexible manufacturing components such as assembly lines, conveyer belts, material handling systems and automated guided transport systems can be looked upon as a network of interconnected service stations. The classical theory of queueing networks might therefore be applicable for estimating system performance measures such as throughputs, blocking probabilities and sojourn times. This paper aims to provide the insight in results that can be adopted from networks of queues for FMS-purposes. These results are twofold: (i) explicit formulae (ii) simple bounds.