A hierarchic approach to production planning and scheduling of a flexible manufacturing system

The paper deals with the problem of improving the machine utilization of a flexible manufacturing cell. Limited tool magazine space of the machines tu rns out to be a relevant bottleneck, A hierarchic approach for this problem is proposed. At the upper level, sets of parts that can be concurrently pr ocessed (batches) are determined. At the lower levels, batches are sequence d,linked, and scheduled. Methods taken from the literature are used for the solution of the latter subproblems, and an original mixed integer programm ing model is formulated to determine batches. The proposed methods are disc ussed on the basis of computational experience carried out on real instance s. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.