A production planning problem in FMS

This work presents a hierarchical approach for generating alternatives for production planning in a generic floor shop problem within the environment of Flexible Manufacturing Systems (hereafter, FMS). Briefly, the problem can be stated as follows: Given the resources of a FMS and the characteristics of the parts to be produced along a planning horizon, obtain the loading ordering of the parts in the FMS, the execution ordering of the operations and the processing route of each part (i.e., the working stations where each operation is to be executed), such that the production and transport costs are minimized and the modules workload is levelized. The problem is decomposed into three subproblems which are arranged in a hierarchy; a variety of models is presented, as well as the input/output relations that allow to integrate them; the author also proposes some algorithmic ideas to exploit the special structure of the problem. Computational experience is reported.