Article ID: | iaor20081213 |
Country: | United States |
Volume: | 18 |
Issue: | 4 |
Start Page Number: | 239 |
End Page Number: | 268 |
Publication Date: | Dec 2006 |
Journal: | International Journal of Flexible Manufacturing Systems |
Authors: | Srinivasan Mandyam M., Yano Candace Arai, Lee Heungsoon Felix |
Keywords: | capacity planning |
We consider the problem of simultaneously determining the number of machines (and/or workers), the assignment of tasks (and related tools and components) to these machines, and the number of jobs circulating in a flexible assembly system (FAS), to satisfy steady-state throughput requirements for a family of similar products at minimum cost. We focus on situations where there are precedence relations among the various tasks, as is common in assembly systems. We present a framework for solving this problem based on a heuristic decomposition approach which involves the solution of only a few types of sub-problems. We demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of the overall procedure using a number of example problems.