Look-ahead control of conveyor-serviced production station under stochastic demand

In this paper we consider a conveyor-serviced production station system (CSPS) under stochastic demand, which is composed of production and sales centres. The production centre is mainly to unload the unprocessed parts and process them, and the sales centre mainly provides the processed parts to the customers. The production centre is affected by the sales centre. We first convert the look-ahead control problem of this system to a semi-Markov decision process (SMDP) model and discuss system and performance matrices of this model. Then, policy iteration (PI) is used to find an optimal control policy under either average- or discounted-cost criteria.