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...

This paper considers the problem of a firm located on a lake in a situation wherein its production process pollutes the lake, while the pollution, in turn, increases the firm's production costs. It is assumed that the pollution caused is proportional to the production rate, that the lake has an...

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...

This paper presents an asymptotic analysis of hierarchical production planning in a manufacturing system with two tandem machines that are subject to breakdown and repair. The system produces a single product, whose rate of demand over time is given to be constant. The problem is formulated as a...

In this paper, we treat an optimal control problem of a stochastic two-machine flowshop with machines subject to random breakdown and repair. While the problem is difficult to solve, it can be approximated by a deterministic problem when the rates of machine failure and repair become large....

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...

We study optimal policies for design reuse in a software project using a control theoretic approach. A project needs to be developed in minimum time by optimally choosing the proportion of effort allocated towards design activities. We first consider a local case, where the benefits of design...

We analyze optimal advertising spending in a duopolistic market where each firm's market share depends on its own and its competitor''s advertising decisions, and is also subject to stochastic disturbances. We develop a differential game model of advertising in which the dynamic behavior is...