Performance evaluation of a single-stage two-product manufacturing system operating under pull-type control

This paper presents a model to analyze a manufacturing system that is operating under pull-type control. A Markovian polling model with finite queues is devised to represent the manufacturing system and studied under three cyclic service policies: exhaustive, gated, and a type of limited policy. These polling models are solved by two different methods: an exact approach that requires the complete characterization of the system as a Markov chain and a decomposition approach that reduces the size of the Markov chain. A set of numerical experiments show that the decomposition approach is quite accurate in estimating system performance measures.