AN ALGORITHM FOR THE WEEKLY PRODUCTION PLANNING OF FLEXIBLE ASSEMBLY SYSTEMS

PPS-FAS is a local, short-term scheduling system inserted between the factory-level production planning and the real-time control system of a plant. In this paper the heuristic algorithm used by PPS-FAS to allo cate the weekly production orders to the single days is described. The algorithm operates in two phases: the first phase generates an interm ediate solution allocating jobs to the production days according to th e objective of balanced utilization of all machines within each day; t he second one improves the solution with respect to the objective of u niform utilization of all machines along the planning horizon.