scheduling a flexible manufacturing system with tooling

The emergence of scheduling a flexible manufacturing system with tooling has sparked an increased interest and appreciation for real-time planning, scheduling, and control. An scheduling a flexible manufacturing system with tooling is defined as a manufacturing system consisting of automatically reprogrammable machines (material processors), automated tool deliveries and changes, automated material handling and transport, and coordinated shop floor control.

Real-time activities primarily refer to daily operations that require efficient, timely, and adaptive responses to short-term planning, scheduling, and execution problems. Pertinent areas of interest include job releases, loading sequences, dead-locks, and response to resource disruptions such as machine or tool failure. Real-time control of an FMS is not a trivial task. Flexible routings, processing, and part mix, as well as the dynamic nature of a shop floor, place tremendous demands upon the control system. A detailed understanding of operational information, beyond mere "data crunching," is required for efficient production. Static schedules and strategies, developed ahead of time, quickly lose validity in a rapidly changing system, and thus cannot be directly applied over long planning horizons.

Applying scheduling a flexible manufacturing system with tooling as a real-time tool requires insight into the responsibilities of the simulation model and its role within the shop floor control system. The objective of this paper is to represent the problems and decision making requirements for a scheduling a flexible manufacturing system with tooling so that real-time operations of a system may be effectively modeled. A framework for applying simulation models to on-line planning, scheduling, and control problems is presented.