Production Planning and Scheduling in Flexible Assembly Systems

The book familiarizes the reader with the flexible assembly systems planning and scheduling issues and various operations research modelling and solution approaches. Some of the many topic highlights presented are the overall structure and components of a flexible assembly system, bi-objective integer programming models and algorithms for machine loading, assembly routing, and assembly plan selection, and fast combinatorial heuristics for scheduling flexible assembly lines with limited intermediate buffers. Also the book deals with just-in-time scheduling of flexible assembly lines, and dynamic dispatching algorithms for simultaneous scheduling of assembly stations and automated guided vehicles.