Operations Research, Systems Engineering and Industrial Engineering Commons^™

A Dynamic Programming Approach To Achieving An Optimal End State Along A Serial Production Line, Shih-Fen Cheng, Blake Nicholson, Marina A. Epelman, Daniel Reaume, Robert L. Smith

Shih-Fen CHENG

In modern production systems, it is critical to perform maintenance, calibration, installation, and upgrade tasks during planned downtime. Otherwise, the systems become unreliable and new product introductions are delayed. For reasons of safety, testing, and access, task performance often requires the vicinity of impacted equipment to be left in a specific “end state” when production halts. Therefore, planning the shutdown of a production system to balance production goals against enabling non-production tasks yields a challenging optimization problem. In this paper, we propose a mathematical formulation of this problem and a dynamic programming approach that efficiently finds optimal shutdown policies for …