Optimal investment in product-flexible manufacturing capacity
Management Science
Probabilistic analysis of network flow algorithms
Mathematics of Operations Research
Principles on the benefits of manufacturing process flexibility
Management Science
Investment Strategies for Flexible Resources
Management Science
Resistance bounds for first-passage percolation and maximum flow
Journal of Combinatorial Theory Series A
Process Flexibility in Supply Chains
Management Science
On Constraint Sampling in the Linear Programming Approach to Approximate Dynamic Programming
Mathematics of Operations Research
Uncertain convex programs: randomized solutions and confidence levels
Mathematical Programming: Series A and B
Managing Flexible Capacity in a Make-to-Order Environment
Management Science
Impact of Partial Manufacturing Flexibility on Production Variability
Manufacturing & Service Operations Management
Characterizing the performance of process flexibility structures
Operations Research Letters
Process Flexibility Revisited: The Graph Expander and Its Applications
Operations Research
Queueing system topologies with limited flexibility
Proceedings of the ACM SIGMETRICS/international conference on Measurement and modeling of computer systems
Super facilities versus chaining in mitigating disruptions impacts
Computers and Industrial Engineering
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The concept of chaining, or in more general terms, sparse process structure, has been extremely influential in the process flexibility area, with many large automakers already making this the cornerstone of their business strategies to remain competitive in the industry. The effectiveness of the process strategy, using chains or other sparse structures, has been validated in numerous empirical studies. However, to the best of our knowledge, there have been relatively few concrete analytical results on the performance of such strategies vis-á-vis the full flexibility system, especially when the system size is large or when the demand and supply are asymmetrical. This paper is an attempt to bridge this gap. We study the problem from two angles: (1) For the symmetrical system where the (mean) demand and plant capacity are balanced and identical, we utilize the concept of a generalized random walk to evaluate the asymptotic performance of the chaining structure in this environment. We show that a simple chaining structure performs surprisingly well for a variety of realistic demand distributions, even when the system size is large. (2) For the more general problem, we identify a class of conditions under which only a sparse flexible structure is needed so that the expected performance is already within ε optimality of the full flexibility system. Our approach provides a theoretical justification for the widely held maxim: In many practical situations, adding a small number of links to the process flexibility structure can significantly enhance the ability of the system to match (fixed) production capacity with (random) demand.