Method of optimizing a serial manufacturing system

A method of optimizing a multi-stage serial manufacturing system, comprising:

• (a) providing a quantitative state-space model of said serial manufacturing system that describes processing in terms of stages, sensitivity information for blocking or starving of such stages, and performance information in terms of part production and buffer storage/retrieval, said description using process switches in the form of buffer status indicators that express coupling between stages;
• (b) using estimated performance information, including buffer size, to simulate said manufacturing system with said model and sensing new sensitivity information that results therefrom;
• and
• (c) concurrently adjusting said performance information, including buffer size, by iteratively using said new sensitivity information in an optimization algorithm to estimate a gradient of the performance information with respect to buffer size and thence adjust buffer size, and repeating steps (b) and (c) until the gradient substantially stabilizes.