An optimal part sending policy for a production system in a general configuration with a new control strategy

We consider a production system in a general configuration with a new control strategy: the push mechanism for the part transport and the kanban technique for the work-in-process (WIP). The production system is composed of many stations such as an entrance station, a set of work stations, a central station, and an exit station, that are arranged in a general configuration. The push mechanism is followed for transporting a part from a station to a destination station. The kanban technique is adopted for controlling the WIP in a work station. The production system is modeled by a closed queuing network in a general configuration with a Markov part sending mechanism and a machine no blocking (MNB) technique. An optimal part sending policy that maximizes the expected system throughput is formulated into a long run average semi-Markov decision process. Three solution approaches are developed for obtaining optimal or suboptimal solutions. Numerical examples are given to evaluate the quality of the solutions obtained by the solution approaches.