Seminar: Özge Büyükdağlı, “A Linear Programming Framework for Control of Tandem Production Lines”

Date-Time: May 13, 2016 – 10.00 – Place: F003

A Linear Programming Framework for Control of Tandem Production Lines

by Özge Büyükdağlı

We consider the optimal control paradigm to characterize the best production/inventory policies for tandem production lines. The system we consider consists of a serial production line with a finished goods buffer at the end.  The tandem line is composed of reliable/unreliable workstations with exponential production times and intermediate buffers. We allow the system to reject part of the demand via rationing in conjunction with the production controls. We report cost components of all policies in detail to clearly illustrate the tradeoffs.

All the research in the area points out that the optimal policies are complicated and are not very likely to be implemented in today’s manufacturing environments.  Hence, it is still very important to understand the performance of Kanban and similar pull mechanisms that are presently being widely used in factory floors.  However, there is an important gap in the literature on the optimization of the parameters for these control mechanisms.

In this study, we propose a new optimization approach for the control policy parameters that is based on the LP formulation of the underlying Markov decision processes.  We further impose the policy structure by constraining the solution space via an innovative introduction of a set of integer variables.  Furthermore, the approach has the flexibility to be transferred to many dynamic control problems.

Short Bio:

Özge Büyükdağlı received her B.Sc. degree (2010) in industrial engineering from İzmir University of Economics and her M.Sc. degree (2013) from Yaşar University. She is currently a PhD candidate of Industrial Engineering and research assistant of International Logistics Management at Yaşar University. Her research interests include performance evaluation of inventory/production systems, stochastic modeling, dynamic programming and optimal control. Currently working on continuous time control of tandem production lines with Dr. M. Murat Fadıloğlu.