Fast high precision decision rules for valuing manufacturingflexibility

The valuation of Flexible Manufacturing Systems is one of the most frequently undertaken productivity improvementactivities. In practice, the introduction of an FMS into industry must be done on the basis of cost justification.Recently developed techniques for the evaluation of the value of flexibility typically include the computation of stochasticdynamic programs. However, the computational effort of stochastic dynamic programs grows combinatoriallyand limits application to real world problems. In this contribution we derive fast approximations to the stochasticdynamic program and compare their results to the exact solution.[...]