MODELING AN ASSEMBLY-LINE FOR CONFIGURATION AND FLOW MANAGEMENT

In its basic form the management control of a flexible production syst em 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 c onstraints is satisfied and some efficiency index is optimized. The ai m of the work is to give a general framework to formulate and model, i n a formal way, different subproblems arising from embedding an assemb ly process on different configurations of a flexible production system . Because of the complexity of the overall problem, it is useful to ha ve simple and well structured layouts and procedures that help the des ign and operation of flexible systems. These layouts and procedures in duce additional constraints, due to the products' and the process' fea tures. The paper also investigates the complexity of various subcases of the problem. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd, All rights reserved