Production Planning And Scheduling In Flexible Assembly Systems

The book familiarizes the reader with the flexible assembly systems planning and scheduling issues and various operations research modelling and solution approaches. Some of the many topic highlights presented are the overall structure and components of a flexible assembly system, bi-objective integer programming models and algorithms for machine loading, assembly routing, and assembly plan selection, and fast combinatorial heuristics for scheduling flexible assembly lines with limited intermediate buffers. Also the book deals with just-in-time scheduling of flexible assembly lines, and dynamic dispatching algorithms for simultaneous scheduling of assembly stations and automated guided vehicles.

This book focuses on planning and scheduling applications. Planning and scheduling are forms of decision-making that play an important role in most manufacturing and services industries. The planning and scheduling functions in a company typically use analytical techniques and heuristic methods to allocate its limited resources to the activities that have to be done. The application areas considered in this book are divided into manufacturing applications and services applications. The book covers five areas in manufacturing: project scheduling, job shop scheduling, scheduling of flexible assembly systems, economic lot scheduling, and planning and scheduling in supply chains. It covers four areas in services: reservations and timetabling, tournament scheduling, planning and scheduling in transportation, and workforce scheduling. At the end of each chapter, a case study or a system implementation is described in detail. Numerous examples and exercises throughout the book illustrate the material presented. The fundamentals concerning the methodologies used in the application chapters are covered in the appendices. The book comes with a CD-ROM that contains various sets of powerpoint slides. The CD also contains several planning and scheduling systems that have been developed in academia as well as generic optimization software that has been developed in industry. This book is suitable for more advanced students in industrial engineering and operations research as well as graduate students in business. Michael Pinedo is the Julius Schlesinger Professor of Operations Management in the Stern School of Business at New York University. His research interests lie in the theoretical and applied aspects of planning and scheduling. He has written numerous papers on the theory of deterministic and stochastic scheduling and has also consulted extensively in industry. He has been actively involved in the development of several large industrial planning and scheduling systems.

The purpose of this book is to discuss the state of the art and future trends in the field of computerized production management systems. It is composed of a number of independent papers, each presented in a chapter. Some of the widely recognized experts in the field around the world have been asked to contribute. lowe each of them my sincere gratitude for their kind cooperation. I am also grateful to Peter Falster and Jim Browne for their kind support in helping me to review topics to be covered and to select the authors. This book is a result of the professional work done in the International Federation of Information Processing Technical Committee IFIP TC5 "Com puter Applications in Technology" and especially in the Working Group WG5. 7 "Computer-Aided Production Management". This group was established in 1978 with the aim of promoting and encouraging the advancement of the field of computer systems for the production management of manufacturing, off shore, construction, electronic and similar and related industries. The scope of the work includes, but is not limited to, the following topics: 1) design and implementation of new production planning and control systems taking into account new technology and management philosophy; 2) CAPM in a CIM environment including interfaces to CAD and CAM; 3) project management and cost engineering; 4) knowledge engineering in CAPM; 5) CAPM for Flexible Manufacturing Systems (FMS) and Flexible Assembly Systems (F AS); 6) methods and concepts in CAPM; 7) economic and social implications of CAPM.

In this book quantitative approaches are proposed for production planning problems in automated manufacturing. In particular, techniques from operations research provide ways to tackle these problems. Special attention is given to the efficient use of tools in automated manufacturing systems. The book presents models and tests solution strategies for different kinds of production decision problems. A case study in the manufacturing of printed circuit boards highlights the methodology. The book will help to understand the nature of production planning problems in automated manufacturing and show how techniques from operations research may contribute to their solution.

This book focuses on the design of Robotic Flexible Assembly Cell (RFAC) with multi-robots. Its main contribution consists of a new effective strategy for scheduling RFAC in a multi-product assembly environment, in which dynamic status and multi-objective optimization problems occur. The developed strategy, which is based on a combination of advanced solution approaches such as simulation, fuzzy logic, system modeling and the Taguchi optimization method, fills an important knowledge gap in the current literature and paves the way for future research towards the goal of employing flexible assembly systems as effectively as possible despite the complexity of their scheduling.

Pinedo is a major figure in the scheduling area (well versed in both stochastics and combinatorics) , and knows both the academic and practitioner side of the discipline. This book includes the integration of case studies into the text. It will appeal to engineering and business students interested in operations research.