The problem of optimal design of the assembly lines is considered. The paper is especially focused on the line balancing and resource planning step for the preliminary design stage. A survey of existing methods and software tools are given. Copyright © 2002 IFAC

The overarching goal of the thesis is to devise new strategies for multi-agent planning and control problems, especially in the case where the agents are subject to random failures, maintenance needs, or other health management concerns, or in cases where the system model is not perfectly known. We argue that dynamic programming techniques, in particular Markov Decision Processes (MDPs), are a ...

Facility layout is one of the most important Operations Management problems due to its direct impact on the financial performance of both private and public firms. Facility layout problem (FLP) with stochastic parameters, unequal area facilities, and grid system modeling is named GSUA-STFLP. This problem has not been worked in the literature so that to solve GSUA-STFLP is our main contribution....

When minimizing makespan during off-line planning, the fastest action sequence to reach a particular state is, by definition, preferred. When trying to reach a goal quickly in on-line planning, previous work has inherited that assumption: the faster of two paths that both reach the same state is usually considered to dominate the slower one. In this short paper, we point out that, when planning...

In today’s market, companies tend to develop long-term multiple-generation product strategies instead of releasing consecutive single products to maintain market competitiveness. Even though this strategy affords market vitality, it also can bring about inter-product-line cannibalization. Cannibalization within a multiple-generation product line is a complex problem, and it has seldom been expl...

Human intent is an integral part of real-time path planning and re-planning, thus any decision aiding system must support human-automation interaction. The appropriate balance between humans and automation for this task has previously not been adequately studied. In order to better understand task allocation and collaboration between humans and automation for geospatial path problem solving, a ...

The unit commitment problem is an important scheduling problem in planning the operation of power generators, and it is a good example of the interest devoted by the Power Engineering sector, to this area of research. It is the on/off decision problem of selecting the power generating units to be in service within a given planning horizon (from 1 day to 2 weeks, generally split in periods of 1 ...

Sequence planning generation is an important problem in assembly line design. A good assembly sequence can help to reduce the cost and time of the manufacturing process. This paper focuses on assembly sequence planning (ASP) known as a hard combinatorial optimization problem. Although the ASP problem has been tackled via even more sophisticated optimization techniques, these techniques are ofte...