More on using forced idle time to improve performance in polling models

A recent interesting paper (Cooper, Niu, and Srinivasan [2]) shows how for some cyclic production systems reducing setup times can surprisingly increa se work in process. There the authors show how in these situations the intr oduction of forced idle time can be used to optimize system performance. He re we show that introducing forced idle time at different points during the production cycle can further improve performance in these situations and a lso in situations where the suggestions from [2] yield no improvement.