Performance bounds for flexible systems requiring setups

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Singh, Mahender P.; Srinivasan, Mandyam M.
• 署名单位: Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); University of Tennessee System; University of Tennessee Knoxville
• 刊物名称: MANAGEMENT SCIENCE
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0025-1909
• DOI: 10.1287/mnsc.1060.0639
• 发表日期: 2007
• 页码: 991-1004
• 关键词: polling models; descendant sets technique; state-dependent service; cyclic service

摘要

Many organizations use product variety as one possible strategy for increasing their competitiveness. They have installed flexible manufacturing systems because these systems offer a powerful means for accommodating production and assembly of a variety of products. However, increased product variety comes at a cost. For instance, if the resource requires to be set up each time it switches to operate on a new product, the resulting delays and costs could negate the intended benefits of increased product variety. Analyzing these flexible resources for optimal design and operation is therefore very important. To address such issues, we model a flexible resource, serving multiple products, using a queueing model-more precisely, a polling model. In this model, a single server attends to multiple service centers (queues) at which requests arrive and queue up for service, performing a setup at a polled queue only if that queue is nonempty. This is the state dependent (SD) polling model. Exact analysis of the SD polling model is inherently very complex. This paper presents a very efficient procedure to compute a hierarchy of successively improving bounds on the values of performance measures obtained from the SD polling model with the exact solution as its limit. This procedure can be applied to quickly estimate performance measures for large SD polling models previously deemed analytically intractable.