Near optimal manufacturing flow controller design

Flow control of flexible manufacturing systems (FMSs) addresses an important real-time scheduling requirement of modern manufacturing facilities, which are prone to failures and other controllable or stochastic discrete events affecting production capacity, such as change of setup and maintenance scheduling. Flow controllers are useful both in the coordination of interconnected flexible manufacturing cells through distributed scheduling policies and in the hierarchical decomposition of the planning and scheduling problem of complex manufacturing systems. Optimal flow-control policies are hedging-point policies characterized by a generally intractable system of stochastic partial differential equations. This article proposes a near optimal controller whose design is computationally feasible for realistic-size systems. The design exploits a decomposition of the multiple-part-type problem to many analytically tractable one-part-type problems. The decomposition is achieved by replacing the polyhedra production capacity sets with inscribed hypercubes. Stationary marginal densities of state variables are computed iteratively for successive trial controller designs until the best inscribed hypercubes and the associated optimal hedging points are determined. Computational results are presented for an illustrative example of a failureprone FMS.