Reducing work-in-process inventory in certain classes of flexible manufacturing systems. (English) Zbl 0605.90064

Shanthikumar, J. George; Stecke, Kathryn E.

Eur. J. Oper. Res. 26, 266-271 (1986).

We establish that maintaining a balanced workload on each machine over time stochastically minimizes the work-in-process inventory in certain types on flexible manufacturing systems (FMSs) with finite or infinite common input buffer storage and an ample buffer et each machine. The results obtained here complement those obtained by K. E. Stecke and T. L. Morin [ibid. 20, 68-82 (1985; Zbl 0578.90035)], in which it is established that balancing workloads maximizes expected production, again for the same, particular types of FMSs. The cited paper treats a static FMS loading problem, while this paper addresses a dynamic problem which considers three strategies to control the release of parts into the system.

MSC:

90B30	Production models
90B05	Inventory, storage, reservoirs
60K20	Applications of Markov renewal processes (reliability, queueing networks, etc.)
90B22	Queues and service in operations research

Keywords:

open and closed queueing networks; work-in-process inventory; flexible manufacturing systems; balancing workloads; dynamic problem

Citations:

Zbl 0578.90035

References:

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