Optimal Control of a Two-Stage Stochastic Hybrid Manufacturing System with Poisson Arrivals and Exponential Service Times

Extending earlier work on single-stage stochastic hybrid system models, we consider a two-stage stochastic hybrid system where the job arrivals are represented through a Poisson process, and the service times required to attain a desired physical state are exponentially distributed dependent on the controllable process rates. For the case where the costs associated with the process rates and the inventory levels are non-decreasing convex, and the process rates take values from finite sets, we show that there exist threshold policies on both inventory levels for selecting the optimal process rates at each station.