PRODUCTION SCHEDULING AND INVENTORY CONTROL FOR MULTI-STAGE MANUFACTURING SYSTEMS.

Abstract

Singular perturbation methods are used to synthesize high-grain error-actuated production control policies for a class of multi-stage manufacturing systems in which each manufacturing subsystem comprises either one or several production facilities. It is shown that when the subsystems are connected in cascade, each can be controlled in isolation, but production control policies based on this approach lead to undesirable transient behavior if the value of the feedback gain parameter is small. An alternative approach whereby production control policies are synthesized for the composite system leads to improved transient behavior. However, if the value of the feedback gain parameter is large, both approaches are shown to yield good transient behavior.