On Server Allocation in Multiple Center Manufacturing Systems

J. George Shanthikumar and David D. Yao
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J. George Shanthikumar: University of California, Berkeley, California
David D. Yao: Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts

Operations Research, 1988, vol. 36, issue 2, 333-342

Abstract: We study the problem of allocating a given number of identical servers among the work centers of a manufacturing system. The problem is formulated as a nonlinear integer program of allocating servers in a closed queueing network to maximize throughput. We show that the throughput of the closed queueing network has a monotonicity property, such that any optimal allocation must give more servers to stations with a higher workload. The number of allocations that satisfy this property is much smaller than the total number of feasible allocations. This property and a bounding technique for the throughput of the closed queueing network are combined to develop a search algorithm to obtain an optimal allocation of servers. A greedy heuristic is also developed, and its optimality proven in the special case of a two-center system (in the general case, its optimality remains a conjecture).

Keywords: 183 facilities design; 361 stochastic models of production systems; 699 optimization of queueing systems (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1988
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

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