The approach in the book considers manufacturing systems in which events occur at different time scales. In such systems, longer term decisions such as those dealing with capital expansion can be based on the average existing production capacity and can be expected to be nearly optimal even though the shorter term capacity fluctuations are ignored. Having the long term decisions in hand, one can then solve the simpler problem of obtaining production rates. Multilevel decisions constructed in this manner are shown to be asymptotically optimal as the average time between successive short-term events becomes much smaller than that between successive long-term events. Much attention is given to establish that the order of deviation of the cost of the hierarchical solution from the optimal cost is small. The striking novelty of the approach is that this is done without the insurmountable task of solving for the optimal solution.

The approach represents a new paradigm in convex production planning and a new research direction in control theory. The research presented cuts across the disciplines of Operations Management, Operations Research, System and Control Theory, Industrial Engineering, Probability and Statistics, and Applied Mathematics.