A tractable class of maximal hedging policies in multi-part manufacturing systems (Q1272975)

Author abstract: The flow control problem in multi-part failure prone manufacturing systems is considered. While computationally attractive, the near optimal controllers of Caramanis and Sharifnia, suffer from the drawback that the production capacity set must be approximated via a very restricted set of inscribed hypercubes, namely those for which a componentwise feasibility requirement is satisfied. Also, due to the completely decoupled nature of production along each component, utilization of the restricted capacity set is suboptimal. A class of capacity set incribed hypercube policies called simple maximal hedging (SMH) policies is introduced. In SMH policies production levels along the various components of the capacity set are coupled, the componentwise feasibility requirement is lifted and there is no underutilization of production capacity if needed. In a \(p\) part types manufacturing system, for partwise additive cost functionals, it is shown that performance evaluation of a given SMH policy reduces to the analysis of \(p\) decoupled (fictitious) semi-Markovian machines. The machines are Markovianized via first passage-time analysis and a Padé approximants technique. Numerical optimization over the class of SMH policies in a sample manufacturing system indicates that their performance can come close to that of the optimal control.