This volume presents the proceedings of the 26th AMS-SIAM Summer Seminar in Applied Mathematics, “The Mathematics of Stochastic Manufacturing Systems”, held in June 1996 at the College of William and Mary (Williamsburg, VA).

Manufacturing is facing rapidly growing challenges in the global marketplace. As an ever-growing discipline, its research involves a wide spectrum of techniques that go far beyond traditional applied mathematics. Manufacturing research cuts across the disciplines of operations research, management science, industrial engineering, systems theory, and applied mathematics. At the forefront of this interdisciplinary area, research in mathematical and computational sciences has become indispensable in the development of new technology and the improvement of existing techniques and management practices.

In this volume, leading experts in mathematical manufacturing research and related fields review and update recent advances in mathematics of stochastic manufacturing systems and attempt to bridge the gap between theory and applications. The topics covered include scheduling and production planning, modeling of manufacturing systems, hierarchical control for large and complex systems, Markov chains, queuing networks, numerical methods for system approximations, singular perturbed systems, risk-sensitive control, stochastic optimization methods, discrete event systems, and statistical quality control.

This book presents research problems, techniques for dealing with problems, and future directions. The interdisciplinary nature is of great advantage to the applied mathematics and manufacturing research communities.