Hierarchical production and setup scheduling in a single machine system

Abstract

A crucial assumption in Chapters 3–7 has been that the machines are completely flexible and thus do not require any setup for switching the production from one product to another. Ideally, the assumption amounts to the possibility of simultaneous production of different products; see also Remark 2.3.1. An important class of manufacturing systems, however, consists of systems that have machines which involve setup costs and/or setup times when switching from production of one product to that of another. Such systems have been considered by Gershwin [71], Gershwin, Caramanis, and Murray [75], Sharifnia, Caramanis, and Gershwin [174], Caramanis, Sharifnia, Hu, and Gershwin [34], Connolly, Dallery, and Gershwin [43], Hu and Caramanis [91, 92], and Srivat-san and Gershwin [187]. They have examined various possible heuristic policies and have carried out numerical computations and simulations. However, they have not studied the policies from the viewpoint of asymptotic optimality.