Article ID: | iaor1994535 |
Country: | United States |
Volume: | 4 |
Issue: | 2 |
Start Page Number: | 183 |
End Page Number: | 209 |
Publication Date: | Jan 1992 |
Journal: | International Journal of Flexible Manufacturing Systems |
Authors: | Kim Yeong-Dae, Yano Candace Arai |
System setup problems in flexible manufacturing systems deal with short-term planning problems such as part type selection, machine grouping, operation assignment, tooling, fixture and pallet allocation, and routing. In this article, the authors consider three of the subproblems: part type selection, machine grouping, and loading. They suggest a heuristic approach to solve the subproblems consistently with the objective of maximizing the expected production rate. The proposed procedure includes routines to generate all possible machine grouping alternatives for a given set of machines, to obtain optimal target workloads for each grouping alternative, and to allocate operations and tools to machine groups. These routines are executed iteratively until a good solution to the system setup problem is obtained. Computational experience is reported.