Accommodating FMS operational contingencies through routing flexibility

Overwhelmed by the complexity of the FMS Deadlock Avoidance problem, current research has essentially ignored the aspects (and beneets) related to ex-ible (dynamic) job routing. Furthermore, extending the currently existing results along this line is non-trivial, primarily because of the fact that the possible routing options for a single job can grow exponentially fast. Hence, computationally eecient techniques are required to incorporate the inherent FMS routing ex-ibility to current structural control schemes. This paper initiates the investigation on the problem of integrating routing exibility in FMS structural control, by addressing the problem of \optimal" job rerouting in case of operational contingencies. An analytical problem formulation and an eecient solution algorithm are developed for the case that the FMS is structurally controlled by the Resource Upstream Neighborhood (RUN) policy, a deadlock avoidance policy recently presented in the literature. Beyond the value of the presented results, the paper is intended also to outline a methodological approach to the underlying problems ; more extensive results on this research can be found in 1].