Joint production and supply control in three levels flexible manufacturing systems

This paper considers a stochastic optimal control problem of a three stages Flexible Manufacturing System. The supplier (i.e., upstream FMS) and the transformation stage (i.e., FMS) are both subject to random events. Our objective is to find a feedback control policy for the supply and production activities that minimizes the incurred cost. It is shown that the considered joint production and supply control problem is difficult to tackle using a dissociated analytical approach. A simulation based approach is thus proposed to achieve a close approximation of the optimal policy. The advantages of the approach include possible extensions after numerical characterization of the optimal control policy.