Article ID: | iaor19992264 |
Country: | United States |
Volume: | 46 |
Issue: | 1 |
Start Page Number: | 36 |
End Page Number: | 45 |
Publication Date: | Jan 1998 |
Journal: | Operations Research |
Authors: | Dallery Yves, Srivatsan N. |
Keywords: | control |
The production control problem in unreliable manufacturing systems has generated a great deal of interest recently. The goal is the real-time calculation of production rates to minimize total expected surplus and backlog costs in a production system. A class of feedback control policies, called hedging point policies, has been studied in literature and shown to be optimal for certain single-part-type systems. This paper focuses mainly on the performance of hedging point policies in two-part-type systems. We first generalize known stability results for hedging point policies in single-part-type systems and extend them to two-part-type systems. An average cost analysis of trajectories is then used to partially characterize an optimal policy belonging to his class. A complete characterization is obtained for special parameter values. The results in this paper provide insights for designing simple yet effective heuristics for controlling manufacturing systems producing many part-types.