Article ID: | iaor19991503 |
Country: | United States |
Volume: | 46 |
Issue: | 2 |
Start Page Number: | 218 |
End Page Number: | 230 |
Publication Date: | Mar 1998 |
Journal: | Operations Research |
Authors: | Gupta Diwakar, Duenyas Izak, Olsen Tava Lennon |
Keywords: | control processes, markov processes |
This paper considers the control of a single-server tandem queueing system with setups. Jobs arrive to the system according to a Poisson process and are produced to order. A single server must perform a number of different operations on each job. There is a setup time for the server to switch between different operations. We assume that there is a holding cost at each operation, which is nondecreasing in operation number (i.e., as value is added to a job, it becomes more expensive to hold). The control problem is to decide which job the server should process at each point in time. We formulate this control problem as a Markov-Decision Process. We partially characterize the optimal policy, develop an exact analysis of exhaustive and gated polling policies, and develop an effective heuristic policy. The results of a simulation study, which tests the performance of the policies considered, are reported. These computational results indicate that our heuristic is effective for a wide variety of cases.