Computation of production control policies by a dynamic programming technique,” in Analysis and

The problem of production management for an automated manu-facturing system is described. The system consists of machines that can perform a variety of tasks on a family of parts. The machines are unreliable, and the main difficulty the control system faces is to meet production requirements while machines fail and are repaired at random times. A multi-level hierarchical control algorithm is proposed which involves a stochastic optimal control problem at the first level. Optimal production policies are characterized and a computational scheme is described