An asymptotic analysis of a hierarchical manufacturing system with machines subject to breakdown and repair is presented. The machine fluctuations are much faster than the accumulation and discounting of costs, and this gives rise to a limiting problem in which the stochastic machine...

Scheduling methods are proposed for a class of flexible manufacturing systems consisting of machine centers served by a cyclic conveyor. The minimization of finish time is considered as the optimization criterion. An optimal algorithm is proposed for the minimum conveyor speed (S = 1) for a...

This paper summarizes the results of its detailed version, which considers optimal infinite horizon stochastic production planning problems with capacity and demand to be finite state Markov chains. Turnpike set concepts are introduced to characterize the optimal inventory levels. It is shown...

We consider a problem of controlling the production rate of a single machine, single product, stochastic manufacturing system in order to minimize the total discounted inventory /backlog costs. The demand has two components: one is deterministic with constant rate d and the other is stochastic...

The optimal production control problem of deterministic pull flow lines with multiple part types is considered in this paper. The last machine is assumed to be the bottleneck. The objective is to minimize the total inventory and backlog costs over time. We give an optimal production policy and...

We study a two-stage purchase contract with a demand forecast update. The purchase contract provides the buyer an opportunity to adjust an initial commitment based on an updated demand forecast obtained at a later stage. An adjustment, if any, incurs a fixed as well as a variable cost. Using a...

This article analyzes a discrete time lost sales inventory system with partially observed demand and unobserved shrinkages which happen both before and after the demand realization. When the demand exceeds the remaining inventory, the unmet demand is lost and unobserved. This problem in general...

This paper considers the production planning problem of a firm that produces a single product using a process that has multiple production lines (or machines) in parallel, each with a finite production capacity. Specifically, the firm has m parallel production lines, each with capacity of P...

This paper is concerned with explicit optimal control for a deterministic manufacturing system consisting of a single reliable machine and producing two part types studied by Connolly (Master Thesis, Operations Research Center, MIT, Cmbridge, 1992) and Gershwin (Manufacturing Systems...

We deal with the problem of a profit-maximizing vendor selling a perishable product. At the beginningof a planning cycle, the vendor determines a minimum committed order per period. During the cycle, he may also place a supplemental order in each period based on the observed demand signal in...