SCHEDULING PARALLEL MANUFACTURING CELLS WITH RESOURCE FLEXIBILITY

This paper investigates the improvements in manufacturing performance that can be realized by broadening, the scope of the production schedu ling function to include both job sequencing and processing-time contr ol through the deployment of a flexible resource. We consider an envir onment in which a set of jobs must be scheduled over a set of parallel manufacturing cells, each consisting of a single machine, where the p rocessing time of each job depends on the amount of resource allocated to the associated cell. Two versions of the problem are introduced: a static problem in which a single resource-allocation decision Is made and maintained throughout the production horizon, and a dynamic probl em in which resource Can be reassigned among the production cells as l ocal bottlenecks shift. We provide mathematical formulations for each version of the problem, establish problem complexity, identify importa nt characteristics of optimal solutions, develop optimal and heuristic solution approaches, and report the results of a set of computational experiments. The computational results demonstrate that substantial i mprovements in operational performance can be achieved through effecti ve utilization of resource flexibility.