We address the issue of performance analysis of fabrication/assembly (F/A) systems, which are systems that first fabricate components and then join the components and subassemblies into a product. Here we consider an F/A system consisting of a single assembly station with input from K fabrication stations. We assume that the system uses a Kanban control mechanism with a fixed number of kanbans circulating between each input station and the assembly station. Even with Markovian assumptions, computing an exact solution for the performance evaluation of such systems becomes intractable due to an explosion in the state‐space. We develop computationally efficient algorithms to approximate the throughput and mean queue lengths. The accuracy of the approximations is studied by comparison to exact results (K = 2) and to simulations (K > 2). Part II of this paper demonstrates how these models can be used as building blocks to evaluate more complex F/A systems with multiple levels of assembly stations.
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