Integrating Layout Design and Material Flow Management in Assembly Systems

The material flow management of flexible assembly systems requires to assign a set of operations to a set of machines, and to connect machines by a transportation network, such that a number of constraints is satisfied and some efficiency index is optimized Aim of the paper is to give a general framework to formulate and model, in a formal way, different subproblems arising from embedding an assembly process on different configurations of a flexible production system. We analyze several wide used architectures and material flow policies, and point out some useful properties to design decision rules and evaluate the corresponding optimality bounds. The paper also investigates the computational complexity of various subcases of the problem.

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