Base-stock control for single-product tandem make-to-stock systems

In this paper, we consider a multiple-stage tandem production/inventory system producing a single product. Processing time at each stage is assumed to have a general stationary processing time distribution. The cost of holding work-in-process (WIP) inventory is different at each stage. Therefore, decisions on when to release work to the system as well as when to transfer WIP from one stage to another need to be made. We formulate this problem of release/production control as a Markov decision process. However, the optimal policy is rather complex, making its implementation impracticable in practice. We therefore investigate the performance of simple base stock policies. Our approach aggregates several stages into one and uses a simple approximation to compute ‘approximately optimal’ base stock levels. We present the results of a simulation study that tests the performance of our approximation in estimating the best base stock levels, and the performance of base stock policies as compared with the optimal policy.