Abstract
Most manufacturing firms are large, complex systems characterized by several decision subsystems, such as finance, personnel, marketing, and operations. They may have a number of plants and warehouses and produce a large number of different products using a wide variety of machines and equipment. Moreover, these systems are subject to discrete events such as construction of new facilities, purchase of new equipment and scrappage of old, machine setups, failures, and repairs, and new product introductions. These events could be deterministic or stochastic. Management must recognize and react to these events. Because of the large size of these systems and the presence of these events, obtaining exact optimal policies to run these systems is nearly impossible both theoretically and computationally.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 1994 Springer Science+Business Media New York
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Sethi, S.P., Zhang, Q. (1994). Concepts of hierarchical decision making. In: Hierarchical Decision Making in Stochastic Manufacturing Systems. Systems & Control: Foundations & Applications. Birkhäuser, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-0285-1_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-0285-1_1
Publisher Name: Birkhäuser, Boston, MA
Print ISBN: 978-1-4612-6694-5
Online ISBN: 978-1-4612-0285-1
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive