An optimal cart moving policy for a flexible manufacturing system

Abstract A flexible manufacturing system is composed of many stations such as a load/unload station, a set of workstations, and a common buffer, that are linked together with a material handling system. Each workstation consists of a limited input buffer, a single machine and a limited output buffer. The material handling system consists of a single cart moving parts in the system according to the process paths required by the parts. A part is blocked when it is moved to a workstation but cannot enter the workstation. The function of the common buffer is to temporarily store blocked parts. A blocked part is treated in accordance with a flexible manufacturing system blocking mechanism. We model the flexible manufacturing system by a closed queueing network with the flexible manufacturing system blocking mechanism and a block-dependent static Markov part routing. An optimal cart moving policy that maximizes the expected system throughput is formulated as an undiscounted semi-Markov decision process. Several properties of the optimization problem are characterized. A loop approach is developed for finding an optimal policy. An example is given to illustrate the methodology, and investigate its convergence.