Adaptive control of stochastic manufacturing systems with hidden Markovian demands and small noise

The adaptive production planning of failure-prone manufacturing systems is considered. In real manufacturing systems, the product demand is usually not known a priori. One of the major tasks in production scheduling is to estimate and predict the demand. In this paper, the authors consider the demand to be either the sum of an unknown rate and a small white noise or the sum of a hidden Markov chain and a small white noise. An algorithm is given to define a family of estimates for the unknown demand processes. Based on this family of estimates, adaptive controls are constructed, which are shown to be nearly optimal.