2. Production management

Real-time production management for high-volume manufacturing systems may seem elementary at first glance. Apart from supply problems, which are not dealt with by the people in charge of the manufacturing system, it essentially boils down to managing system component stoppages.

The fact of having many machining stations in series means that the yield of the manufacturing system can be very low, despite the relatively high reliability of each station. In fact, thirty stations in series with a unit efficiency of 0.95 give an overall efficiency of just over 20%.

We could, of course, set up stocks between all the machining stations, but then we'd run into other problems. For example, if the stocks between stations are large enough never to be either saturated or empty (queuing theory shows that this is theoretically impossible,...