Optimal cycle production of a manufacturing system subject to deterioration

A single part type, single machine, fluid model manufacturing system is considered. The machine is subject to a deterministic deterioration process, which depends on the operation rate. The objective is to minimize a long term average cost index which penalizes inventory surplus and backlog. The optimal policy determined presents some similarities with the policy conjectured optimal for Markov failure prone systems. The considered problem can be applied to several real contexts, not only from the manufacturing domain, as briefly discussed in the paper.