A queueing approach to manufacturing flow control models

Presents a new method developed to study the problem of optimal production control in failure prone manufacturing systems. The key idea of the method is to explore a relationship of the failure prone manufacturing systems to some simple queueing systems. By using this relationship the author can easily evaluate cost functions based on existing results in queueing theory and some simple level crossing techniques. In addition to its simplicity, the method is applicable to non-Markovian systems while previous methods are mainly limited to Markovian systems. Several examples are provided to illustrate the basic idea of the method and to which systems it may be applied.