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

Purpose - 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. Design/methodology/approach - 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. Findings - 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. Originality/value - 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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]