DYNAMIC TYPE MATING

We address an assembly problem, motivated by flat panel display manufa cturing, where the quality (or performance) of the final product depen ds upon characteristics of the components to be assembled, which are n ot constant from component to component. We analyze the tradeoff betwe en the increase in the potential value of products gained by putting o ff the ''mating'' of components exhibiting various characteristic ''ty pes,'' and the inventory costs caused by this delay in mating. We form ulate this dynamic type mating problem as a Markov Decision Process an d characterize the structure of the optimal policy for special cases. We then present a heuristic policy for a more general case and compare its performance against the optimal policy. Computational results ind icate that the heuristic is effective for a wide variety of cases.