Decision making under uncertainty for a class of production systems with serial and parallel operations

The purpose of this paper is to present results concerning resource distribution problems for a class of production systems composed of production operations described by relations with uncertain parameters – for newly considered serial‐parallel and parallel‐serial structures.

The resource distribution problems are formulated. For the typical mathematical model of a single production operation, the resource distribution algorithms are derived analytically or, when that is impossible, numerical procedures for finding solutions to distribution problems are suggested.

The uncertain variables have been proved as a convenient tool for solving specific optimization problems in production management based on relational knowledge representation with unknown parameters.

The paper presents analytical resource distribution and numerical algorithms for determining the optimal resource distribution, which may be applied in knowledge‐based management‐level decision systems for serial‐parallel and parallel‐serial structures of production systems.