Finite capacity material requirement planning system for assembly flow shop with alternative work centres

摘要

This paper aims to develop a new finite capacity material requirement planning (FCMRP) system for an assembly flow shop with alternative work centres. It is a four-step procedure that firstly uses a variable lead-time MRP system to generate material and manufacturing plans. Secondly, dispatching rules are applied to determine sequence of customer orders. Thirdly, operations of orders are scheduled on the first and second priority work centres using various scheduling heuristics. Finally, the start times of operations are optimally adjusted by the LP model considering the finite capacity of all work centres and precedence of operations. Three industrial case studies are used to analyse the performances of the proposed system. The results show that the scheduling options/methods and dispatching rules significantly affect the performances of the proposed FCMRP system and the proposed FCMRP system greatly outperforms the FCMRP system of Wuttipornpun et al. (2006) considering overall performance index. In addition, the system requires short computational time when applied to industrial situations.