Optimal strategies for design and operation of a flexible manufacturing system

Consider a two stage manufacturing system with a finite capacity, consisting of a set of sub-assembly stations and a set of assembly stations, linked by a material handling system. In this system, to manufacture the finished components, the semi-finished components after being processed at the corresponding sub-assembly stations are accordingly routed to the assembly stations. In this paper, to control the bottleneck, two stochastic optimization models are presented for formulating the optimal strategies for design and operation of the manufacturing system. These models are solved by corresponding algorithms given in this paper.