This paper is concerned with an asymptotic analysis of hierarchical production and setup scheduling in a stochastic manufacturing system consisting of a single failure-prone machine and facing constant demands for a number of products. At any given time the system can only produce one type of...

We present a new paradigm of hierarchical decision making in production planning and capacity expansion problems under uncertainty. We show that under reasonable assumptions, the strategic level management can base the capacity decision on aggregated information from the shop floor, and the...

This paper presents an asymptotic analysis of hierarchical investment and production decisions in a manufacturing system with machines subject to breakdown and repair. The demand facing the system is assumed to be a given constant. The production capacity can be increased by purchasing a new...

We deal with a single or parallel machine manufacturing system with convex cost of holding and backlogging and develop a new rigorous analysis to address the problem. We provide the results needed for the vanishing discount approach used for aour analysis. In particular, we show that one can go...

We consider a production-inventory planning problem with time-varying demands, convex production costs and a warehouse capacity constraint. It is solved by use of the Lagrangian form of the maximum principle. The possible existence of strong decision and forecast horizons is demonstrated. When...

In many applications, robotic cells are used in repetitive production of identical parts. A robotic cell contains two or more robot-served machines. The robot can have single or dual gripper. The cycle time is the time to produce a part in the cell. We consider single part-type problems. Since...

We consider an N-machine flowshop with unreliable machines and bounds on work-in-process. Machine capacities and demand processes are finite-state Markov chains. The problem is to choose the rates of production on the machines over time to minimize the expected discounted costs of production and...

We present some insights obtained from the considerable research that has accumulated in proving that a hierarchical decomposition based on the frequencies of occurence of different types of events in the system results in near-optimal decisions as the rates of some events become large compared...

This paper deals with an asymptotic analysis of hierarchical production planning in stochastic manufacturing systems consisting of a single or parallel failure-prone machines producing a number of different products without attrition. The objective is to choose production rates over time in...

This paper is concerned with the problem of production planning in a stochastic manufacturing system with serial machines that are subject to breakdown and repair. The machine capacities are modeled as Markov chains. Since the number of parts in the internal buffers between any two the problem...