Energy-efficient production control of a make-to-stock system with buffer- and time-based policies

Barış Tan, Oktay Karabağ*, Siamak Khayyati

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticleAcademicpeer-review

2 Citations (Scopus)
7 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

Increasing energy efficiency in manufacturing has significant environmental and cost benefits. Turning on or off a machine dynamically while considering the production rate requirements can offer substantial energy savings. In this work, we examine the optimal policies to control production and turn on and off a machine that operates in working, idle, off, and warmup modes for the case where demand inter-arrival, production, and warmup times have phase-type distributions. The optimal control problem that minimises the expected costs associated with the energy usage in different energy modes and the inventory and backlog costs is solved using a linear program associated with the underlying Markov Decision Process. We also present a matrix-geometric method to evaluate the steady-state performance of the system under a given threshold control policy. We show that when the inter-arrival time distribution is not exponential, the optimal control policy depends on both the current phase of the inter-arrival time and inventory position. The phase-dependent policy implemented by estimating the current phase based on the time elapsed since the last arrival yields a buffer- and time-based policy to control the energy mode and production. We show that policies that only use the inventory position information can be effective if the control parameters are chosen appropriately. However, the control policies that use both the inventory and time information further improve the performance.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)5809-5827
Number of pages19
JournalInternational Journal of Production Research
Volume62
Issue number16
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2024

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2023 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Energy-efficient production control of a make-to-stock system with buffer- and time-based policies'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this