Optimality of zero-inventory policies for unreliable manufacturing systems
Operations Research
Hierarchical decision making in stochastic manufacturing systems
Hierarchical decision making in stochastic manufacturing systems
Monotonicity of optimal flow control for failure-prone production systems
Journal of Optimization Theory and Applications
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The flow control problem in multi-part failure pronemanufacturing systems is considered. While computationnaly attractive,the near optimal controllers of Caramanis and Sharifnia, sufferfrom the drawback that the production capacity set must be approximatedvia a very restricted set of inscribed hypercubes, namely thosefor which a componentwise feasibility requirement is satisfied.Also, due to the completely decoupled nature of production alongeach component, utilization of the restricted capacity set issuboptimal. A class of capacity set incribed hypercube policiescalled simple maximal hedging (SMH) policies is introduced. InSMH policies production levels along the various components ofthe capacity set are coupled, the componentwise feasibility requirementis lifted, and there is no underutilization of production capacityif needed. In a p part types manufacturing system,for partwise additive cost functionals, it is shown that performanceevaluation of a given SMH policy reduces to the analysis of p decoupled (fictitious) semi-Markovian machines.The machines are Markovianized via first passage-time analysisand a Padé approximants technique. Numerical optimizationover the class of SMH policies in a sample manufacturing systemindicates that their performance can come close to that of theoptimal control.