A queueing network/branch-and-bound approach to lot scheduling in flexible manufacturing systems

A number of lots of different parts with due dates and release times have to be scheduled for processing in a flexible manufacturing system. Different lots can be processed by different subsets of the available machines; concurrent processing is sought to achieve high machine utilization. This leads to a production planning problem in which the lot processing times depend on the schedule itself, and have to be estimated by some mathematical model of the plant. A multi-stage decision problem is formulated and a branch-and-bound procedure to solve it is presented and compared with previous heuristics.