A robust policy for serial agile production systems

One of the major problems in modeling production systems is how to treat the job arrival process. Restrictive assumptions such as Markovian arrivals do not represent real world systems, especially if the arrival process is generated by job departures from upstream workstations. Under these circumstances, cost-effective policies that are robust with respect to the nature of the arrival process become of interest. In this paper, we focus on minimizing the expected total holding and setup costs in a two-stage produce-to-order production system operated by a cross-trained worker. We will show that if setup times are insignificant in comparison with processing times, then near-optimal policies can be generated with very robust performances with respect to the arrival process. We also present conditions under which these near-optimal policies can be obtained by using only the arrival and service rates. (C) 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.