Optimal production control record for tandem manufacturing lines

In this paper authors introduce novel results on optimality and performance for surplus-based decentralized production control method. The main objective of this production method is to guarantee that the cumulative number of produced products follows the cumulative production demand on the output of any given network. As an extension of our previous result a general idea of this method is presented for the case of one manufacturing machine, where the implemented control strategy is proven to be optimal. Then a flow model for a line of N machines with bounded buffers is analyzed. Results on performance of this strategy for a line of machines show the uniform ultimate boundedness of production errors of each machine in the network. Performance and robustness issues of the closed-loop flow line model are illustrated in numerical simulations.