Maximisation of long-run average profit through dynamic control of production and pricing in a manufacturing system

Abstract

This paper concerns the joint management problem of production control and dynamic pricing to balance the finished goods inventory and market demand in a make-to-stock manufacturing system using a long-run average profit criterion. In the system, the production rate is random, with a controllable mean rate, and the demand is Markov, with a changeable mean rate which depends on the sale price. The management issue is how to dynamically adjust the production rate and the selling price to maximise the long-run average profit. We discover that the optimal policy of dynamic pricing and production control over an infinite horizon is a matter of thresholds. An effective algorithm is suggested.