Optimal control of a class of hybrid systems

We develop a modeling framework for a class of hybrid systems which arise in many manufacturing environments and study the optimal control of such models. The framework uses a queueing network to describe the movement of jobs through a manufacturing facility. As jobs wait in queues and get processed in servers, their physical characteristics change according to differential equations. The state of each job has a temporal component whose evolution is described by discrete-event queueing dynamics, and a physical component whose evolution is described by time-driven dynamics. Calculus of variations techniques are used to derive optimal policies