PRODUCTION SCHEDULING IN A FLEXIBLE MANUFACTURING SYSTEM WITH SETUPS

A model is presented for the planning and scheduling of production batches in a flexible manufacturing system environment in which setup costs and times are nonnegligible and alternate routings are possible. The formulation is an integer program with a multicommodity flow network structure. A heuristic procedure based on price-directive decompostion using column generation is used to obtain solutions. Numerical experimentation is performed to assess die quality of the heuristic versus optimal solutions, and to determine the impact of routing flexibility on total cost, inventory levels, bottlenecks, capacity utilization, throughput time, number of setups and split lots. Important cost-benefit trade-off implications are shown for the design of flexible manufacturing systems.

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