A State Aggregation Approach to Manufacturing Systems Having Machine States with Weak and Strong Interactions
Operations Research, Vol. 39, No. 6, pp. 970-978, November-December 1991
9 Pages Posted: 29 Apr 2008 Last revised: 6 May 2017
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: Optimal control, dynamic systems, decomposition, aggregation, near optimization, hierarchical control, Systems wirh weak and strong interactions
JEL Classification: M11, C61
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation