Production planning for flexible manufacturing systems with multiple machine types: a practical method

摘要

We study three important production planning problems for flexible manufactur- ing systems (FMSs) that consist of multiple types of machines. Namely we address machine grouping, workload allocation among machine groups, and batch sizing that maximize system throughput, when part types are selected for the upcoming production period. This differs from earlier related works in that earlier works give either only qualitative characteristics of the optimum solution or provide a solution method for FMSs consisting of only one type of flexible machine. In this paper, we provide both the optimum and heuristic methods to simultaneously solve the three problems for realistic FMSs.