THE QUEUING EQUIVALENCE TO A MANUFACTURING SYSTEM WITH FAILURES

We consider optimal production rate control in a failure prone manufacturing system. It is well known that the hedging point policy is the optimum controller for such a system. We show that under the hedging point policy the system can be treated as an M/M/1 queue. Therefore, the existing results in queueing theory can be readily applied to obtaining the steady-state probability density function of the production surplus, based on which the optimal hedging point policy can be computed. To a large extent, our approach is based on sample path analysis. It not only provides an alternative way to solve the problem but also reveals some interesting insights. Furthermore, the approach can be potentially applied to problems which we may find hard to deal with using conventional means.