Discrete-time minimax production planning for manufacturing systems

This paper deals with the production planning problem for discrete-time manufacturing systems with deteriorating items. A minimax approach is presented throughout the paper for the case where the demand is unknown. Both the cases of finite horizon and infinite horizon are discussed. Moreover, the case of production planning for manufacturing systems with failure-prone machines is also considered. For this case, a stochastic approach is used in which the states of the machines are represented by a two-state Markov process with transition rates determined by the availability of the machines. Finally, a robust control policy to take care of plant uncertainties is developed. Simulation results are also presented to show the usefulness of the approaches.