A hierarchical approach for responsive production planning and control in flexible manufacturing systems

Abstract

The aim of this thesis is to build up a responsive production planning and control system (PPCS) framework for a Flexible Manufacturing System (FMS), which can handle exible process plans. In the existence of such exibility, the composition of the set of operations required to manufacture a part type may be variable and this type of exibility not only gives opportunity to process operations on di erent machines but also allows producing the same part type with di erent operation sequences. PPCS framework tries to generate the production plan and control of FMS while facilitating the mentioned exibility for achieving the best possible performance. For this purpose, a three-level PPCS model is developed. Problems related to each level and communication schema among the levels are de ned. For each problem de- ned, solution methods are provided; parameter updating based on inter-level feedback are performed; re-planning and infeasibility overcoming strategies are developed. To achieve all these tasks mathematical programming, heuristics and simulation are used. Finally, the performance of the proposed PPCS is tested under di erent scenarios.