Scheduling one-part-type serial manufacturing system under periodic demand: a solvable case

The paper studies one-part type, multiple-stage production system with periodic demands. A buffer of infinite capacity is placed after each machine. Inventory flow through buffers is controlled by machine production rates. The objective is to find a cyclic production rate, which minimizes all inventory-related expenses over an infinite planning horizon. With the aid of the maximum principle, optimal production policies are derived and the continuous-time scheduling problem is reduced to a discrete timing problem. As a result, a polynomial-time algorithm is suggested to calculate the optimal production rate. A numerical example is used to illustrate the algorithm. Scope and purpose Numerical and heuristic approaches have been suggested for production control of automated-serial-manufacturing systems. These approaches try to derive production control policies that would minimize overall costs related to inventory, backlog, and production. The quality of these approaches is often difficult to assess, and they can be time-consuming to implement. Therefore, increasing attention has been directed to optimal control policies of production systems that can be derived precisely and quickly. This paper addresses a special case of the production system manufacturing a single product type to meet a periodic demand. Given a certain assumption on cost relationship, we derive a fast and simple scheduling algorithm that calculates the optimal policy.