Hedging-point control policy for a failure-prone manufacturing system

Abstract

The production control of failure-prone manufacturing systems is notoriously difficult because such systems are uncertain and non-linear. Since the introduction of hedging-point policies, many researches have been done in this field. However, there are few literatures that consider the production control problem of tree-structured manufacturing systems. In this article, a hedging-point production control policy is proposed for a multi-machine, tree-structured failure-prone manufacturing system. To obtain the optimal hedging points, an iterative learning algorithm is developed by considering the system’s characteristics. A simulation method is embedded in the iterative learning algorithm to calculate the system cost. To estimate the performance of the proposed algorithm, comparisons are made between our algorithm, genetic algorithm and particle swarm optimization algorithm. The experimental results show that our algorithm works better than others in reducing the computation time and minimizing the production cost.