A State Aggregation Approach to Manufacturing Systems Having Machine States with Weak and Strong Interactions
- 1 December 1991
- journal article
- Published by Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) in Operations Research
- Vol. 39 (6) , 970-978
- https://doi.org/10.1287/opre.39.6.970
Abstract
A hierarchical approach to control a manufacturing system, subject to multiple machine states modeled by a Markov process with weak and strong interactions, is suggested. The idea is to aggregate strongly interacting or high transition probability states within a group of states and consider only the transition between these groups for the analysis of the system in the long run. We show that such an aggregation results in a problem of reduced size, whose solution can be modified in a simple way to obtain an asymptotically optimal feedback solution to the original problem. Also, an example is solved to illustrate the results developed in the paper.Keywords
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