Performance Evaluation of a Make-to-Stock Production Line with a Two-Parameter-Per-Machine Policy: The Control Point Policy

This paper presents a decomposition method for evaluating the performance of a production line with finite buffers controlled by the Control Point Policy (CPP), a policy with two parameters per machine. (One parameter is the buffer size; the other is a local hedging point.) Policies with two parameters per machine show very good performance while remaining simple to use. However, decomposition methods have not yet been developed for their analysis. We consider a production line, with exponentially distributed processing, failure, and repair times, controlled by a CPP. We decompose this line into two-machine CPP-controlled lines, which considerably simplifies the decomposition equations. Furthermore, the information loops are then included in the building blocks, and can be solved numerically. A numerical study shows that the method is accurate.