A note on the corridor policy for setup scheduling of manufacturing systems

In this article the corridor policy for setup scheduling of manufacturing systems is studied. The setup times are nonzero. First we give alternative proofs for the uniqueness of the limit cycles and finite reachability of the converging hypercone corridor policy. We then propose a "pencil policy". It is a "nonlinear" scheduling policy which combines the small swing property of the parallel corridor policy and the stability property of the hypercone corridor policy. Certain properties as well as several design issues of the pencil policy are investigated.