Optimal control of switching diffusions with application to flexible manufacturing systems

A controlled switching diffusion model is developed to study the hierarchical control of flexible manufacturing systems. The existence of a homogeneous Markov nonrandomized optimal policy is established by a convex analytic method. Using the existence of such a policy, the existence of a unique solution in a certain class to the associated Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman equations is established and the optimal policy is characterized as a minimizing selector of an appropriate Hamiltonian.