be modeled as a dynamic programming problem however it is impractical to solve for the optimal policy in this model due to the long time horizon in reality and the exponentially growing state space to tackle the problem we use several approximate approaches and demonstrate the performance of these approaches in a three period model we present the standard dynamic programming approach to derive the optimal policy below approximate policies are also discussed below where our focus is on the discussion of two approximate approaches we test these policies under various situations and show there is a significant value in adopting approximate approaches furthermore we compare these approaches under different situations and show under which condition approximate approaches can achieve near optimal performance among all approaches discussed the rolling flexible approach and the nearest neighbor approach stand out for their computational efficiency and performance the valuation of production optimization through real time flow control can be formulated as a dynamic programming problem however the numerical solution of this problem is nearly always computationally intractable because of the huge computational complexity for problems of realistic size in order to solve this problem we studied a set of approximate optimization policies with application to an example fcv problem whose size allowed the optimal solution to be computed for comparison with the various approximations among these strategies the rolling flexible and the 1 neighbor approximation policies are most effective with respect to our example problem.