ESTIMATING PERFORMANCE-MEASURES IN REPETITIVE MANUFACTURING ENVIRONMENTS VIA STOCHASTIC CYCLIC SCHEDULING

In this paper we review the cyclic scheduling paradigm for repetitive manufacturing environments. System performance is measured by system t hroughput and job flow time. For a given cyclic job sequence and opera tion precedence structure, we are interested in the steady-state behav ior of these measures when processing times are stochastic. We present an iterative approximation scheme based on Clark's method to estimate the two-moment behavior of these performance measures. Computational tests demonstrate that the approach is a useful alternative to simulat ion.