DETERMINISTIC TIMED EVENT GRAPHS FOR PERFORMANCE OPTIMIZATION OF CYCLIC MANUFACTURING PROCESSES

A model of a cyclic manufacturing system representable as a determinis tic timed event graph is considered in this paper. It is possible to a pply analytical techniques for performance evaluation of such systems. On this basis, a two-level optimization problem is considered. The hi gher level refers to the maximization of the system productivity with respect to the assignment of operations to machines, the lot sizes, an d the service sequences at the various machines, assuming that unlimit ed work-in-progress and buffers of infinite dimension are available. T he lower level deals with the minimization of an aggregate cost taking into account the work-in-progress and the buffer dimensions.