Intelligent and cooperative manufacturing planning

In this research, several intelligent strategies have been developed to build up cooperative Process Planning and Scheduling (CPPS). Three game theory-based strategies have been introduced to analyse the cooperative integration of the two processes in a systematic way. To address the multiple constraints in the CPPS problem, a fuzzy logic-based Analytical Hierarchical Process (AHP) technique has been applied. In the meantime, modern heuristic algorithms have been developed and applied to the CPPS problem to identify optimal or near-optimal solutions from the vast search space efficiently. Experiments have been conducted and results show the objectives of the research have been achieved. [Received 31 December 2008; Revised 9 August 2009; Accepted 17 August 2009]