Design and operation of manufacturing systems: the control-point policy

This paper synthesizes recent work by the author and his colleagues on the performance analysis of manufacturing systems and on real-time scheduling methods. It describes a decentralized scheduling/control policy and proposes a method for analyzing the performance of systems that are operated according to the policy. It presents three views of the production system: surplus-based, time-based, and token-based; and shows how they are equivalent in special cases. While there are no assurances of optimality, experience suggests that the policy has desirable characteristics. The paper also suggests how the physical resources and the control policy can be designed together.