Optimal decomposition of production plans in flexible automated workshops

The paper addresses the problem of the optimal decomposition of production plans in flexible automated workshops. A nonlinear programming model of production planning in a workshop is built up and then transformed into a linear programming model. Because the scale of the model for a general workshop is too large to be solved by the simplex method on a microcomputer, Karmarkar's algorithm and a new interaction/prediction algorithm are used to solve the model, on the basis of which the corresponding programs have been written. Through production planning examples, Karmarkar's algorithm, interaction/prediction algorithm and linear programming method in Matlab are compared, thus showing that the proposed approaches are very effective.