THE ILLUSTRATION OF THE ROUTING SENSITIVITY CALCULATION OF FLEXIBLE MANUFACTURING SYSTEMS WITH PERTURBATION ANALYSIS

Abstract

The effect of the change of the routing mix on the throughput is an important question to be answered by operations management both at the planning and control phases of an FMS. This paper presents a method for the calculation of the gradient of the throughput with respect to the routing mix. The algorithm is based on perturbation analysis (PA) and on the product form properties of certain type of queuing networks. The provided gradient estimate is exact when conditions on the product form equilibrium distribution of the network are met, but it can also give good approximative results in other cases. Numerical examples are presented to illustrate the proposed calculation.