The control of manufacturing systems with variable demands has attracted much research attention over the years. However, only limited results have been obtained due to the difficulty of this production-control problem. In this paper, genetically optimized short-run hedging points are used to construct gain-scheduled adaptive controllers for unreliable manufacturing systems with variable demands. The performance of such adaptive controllers is illustrated for unreliable systems subjected to piecewise-constant demands. It is demonstrated that the performance of these adaptive controllers is superior, in general, to that of genetically optimized non-adaptive controllers. However, such gain-scheduled adaptive controllers are designed for variable demands that are piecewise-constant. Therefore, in order to deal with more general classes of variable demands, a genetic rule-induction design methodology is used to synthesize robust fuzzy-logic controllers to provide automatic closed-loop control for unreliable manufacturing systems. Such robust fuzzy-logic controllers are shown to provide effective control for unreliable manufacturing systems with various kinds of variable demands.