CONTROL OF A SINGLE-SERVER TANDEM QUEUING SYSTEM WITH SETUPS

This paper considers the control of a single-server tandem queueing sy stem with setups. Jobs arrive to the system according to a Poisson pro cess and are produced to order. A single server must perform a number of different operations on each job. There is a setup time for the ser ver to switch between different operations. We assume that there is a holding cost at each operation, which is nondecreasing in operation nu mber (i.e., as value is added to a job, it becomes more expensive to h old). The control problem is to decide which job the server should pro cess at each point in time. We formulate this control problem as a Mar kov-Decision Process. We partially characterize the optimal policy, de velop an exact analysis of exhaustive and gated polling policies, and develop an effective heuristic policy. The results of a simulation stu dy, which tests the performance of the policies considered, are report ed. These computational results indicate that our heuristic is effecti ve for a wide variety of cases.