Control and coordination policies for systems with buffers

Abstract

We study systems consisting of a number of service cells in tandem, each containing a finite buffer. Several policies governing the operation of such systems are described and compared. These include traditional and novel blocking schemes, with applications to computer communications and production lines. In particular, it is shown that kanban, a novel discipline for coordinating cells in a manufacturing context, is obtained by combining two, more basic, concepts: a blocking policy introduced here as minimal blocking, and shared buffers. The Kanban discipline is superior in terms of throughput to the ordinary transfer blocking policy.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 13 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.