An engine repair shop has a balanced 5-station flow line to repair the engines. First, the engines are mounted on a fixture and move down the line one station at a time. Upon completion, the engines are dismounted from the fixture and go to shipping. The fixture will be used to mount the next engine and enter the first station. There are always engines waiting to be repaired. The Expertfit suggested exponential distribution with an average repair time of 10 minutes on each station.

3.1. (10) Please make necessary assumptions then find the expected cycle times as a function of the number of fixtures using raw processing times, bottleneck rate and critical WIP to simplify.

3.2. (5) Please find the expected throughput as a function of the fixtures.

3.3. (5) Please find the utilization as a function of the fixtures.

3.4. (10) Please plot the cycle time, throughput and utilization as a function of the number of fixtures from 3 to 30 (you might want to do this on a computer).

3.5. (2) Please observe your results in 2.1 through 2.4 and state the impact of uncertainty and WIP compared to the deterministic counterpart.