A great deal of work has been done to analyze the problem of robot move sequencing and part scheduling in robotic flowshop cells. We examine the recent developments in this literature. A robotic flowshop cell consists of a number of processing stages served by one or more robots. Each stage has...

This paper considers a problem of optimal preventive maintenance and replacement schedule of equipment devoted to extracting resources from known deposits. Typical examples are oil drills, mine shovels, etc. At most one replacement of the existing machinery by a new one is allowed. The problem...

This paper is concerned with near-optimal control of manufacturing systems consisting of two unreliable machines in tandem and having the objective of minimizing the total discounted cost of inventories/shortages over an infinite horizon. Asymptotic optimal feedback controls are constructed with...

Part-orienting systems are employed in many manufacturing environments to feed work parts in correct orientation for proper operations. A part-orienting system is a serial arrangement of orienting devices; the selection and ordering of these devices is an important design aspect that is...

We consider a production planning problem in a two-machine flowshop subject to breakdown and repair of machines and subject to nonnegativity and upper bound constraints on work-in-process. The objective is to choose machine production rates over time to minimize the long-run average...

This paper is concerned with a periodic review inventory system with fast and slow delivery modes, fixed ordering cost, and regular demand forecast updates. At the beginning of each period, on-hand inventory and demand information are updated. At the same time, decisions on how much to order...

We study the problem of scheduling a chain-reentrant shop, in which each job goes for its processing first to a machine called the primary machine, then to a number of other machines in a fixed sequence, and finally back to the primary machine for its last operation. The problem is to schedule...

Markov-modulated processes have been used in stochastic inventory models with setup costs for modeling demand under the influence of uncertain environmental factors, such as fluctuating economic and market conditions. The analyses of these models have been carried out in the literature only...

This paper presents an extension of earlier research on hierarchical control of stochastic manufacturing systems with long-run average cost in which a positive inventory deterioration/cancellation rate for each product is assumed. Here we drop the assumption of the positive inventory...

In many real-life contexts, inventory levels are only incompletely observed due to nonobservation of demand, discrepancies in transmitting sales data, transaction errors, spoilage, misplacement, or theft of inventory. We study a periodic review inventory system where the demand is not observed...