Dynamics Between Order and Chaos in a Simple Reentrant Model of Production Dynamics

Abstract

We consider a simple reentrant model of a manufacturing process, consisting of one machine at which two different types of items have to be processed. The model is completely deterministic: all delivery and processing times are fixed, and are generally incommensurate. Dependent on the arrival and processing times, a queue of waiting items grows, remains constant or disappears. We demonstrate that the dynamics of the system crucially depends on the queue type. Complexity is most observed for the case of growing queue. We characterize this dynamics between order and chaos with the T-entropy and the autocorrelation function.