The Impact of Uncertainty on a Production Line
建立多阶段生产系统的离散时间模型，分析产出率不确定性和需求不确定性对各阶段产量和库存的影响，提出用线性生产规则近似复杂规则，并给出稳态下均值和方差的闭式解，为生产计划、库存控制和产能规划提供依据。
This paper presents a discrete time model of a multi-stage production system that faces two major types of uncertainties: the output rate at each production stage and the demand for the finished product. Our goal is to analyze the impact of these uncertainties on the production level and on the inventory level at each stage in order to provide insights for production planning, inventory control, quality improvement, and capacity planning. We propose a scheme in which a complex production rule is approximated by a linear production rule (that follows the “restoration” concept introduced by Denardo and Tang 1988). This linear production rule leads the system to steady state in which the means and the variances of the production and inventory levels can be expressed in closed form. These closed form expressions enable us to develop a simple approach for determining a “good” production rule and for analyzing the impact of increasing the yield rates and reducing the variance of the demand. The goodness of this approximation scheme is illustrated by an example.