The design and use of flexible manufacturing systems (FMSs) involve some intricate operations research problems. FMS design problems include, for example, determining the appropriate number of machine tools of each type, the capacity of the material handling system, and the size of buffers. FMS planning problems include the determination of which parts should be simultaneously machined, the opt...

We propose a hybrid method designed to solve a problem of dispatching and conflict free routing of automated guided vehicles (AGVs) in a flexible manufacturing system (FMS). This problem consists in the simultaneous assignment, scheduling and conflict free routing of the vehicles. Our approach consists in a decomposition method where the master problem (scheduling) is modelled with constraint p...

Flexible manufacturing system (FMS) is the one, which can be changed or adapted quickly to manufacture different components or products at different volumes of product. Flexible manufacturing system includes – a set of flexible machines, an automatic transport system and a sophisticated database with decision support system, to decide at each instant what is to be done on which machine. The obj...

In this paper a complex scheduling problem in flexible manufacturing system (FMS) has been addressed with a novel approach called knowledge based genetic algorithm (KBGA). The literature review indicates that meta-heuristics may be used for combinatorial decision-making problem in FMS and simple genetic algorithm (SGA) is one of the meta-heuristics that has attracted many researchers. This nove...

General preventive maintenance model for the components of a system, which improves the reliability to ‘as good as new,’ was used to optimize the maintenance cost. The cost function of a maintenance policy was minimized under given availability constraint. On the other hand, in order to ensure appropriate reliability and availability, the development of the optimal maintenanc...

The increased use of flexible manufacturing systems (FMS) to efficiently provide customers with diversified products has created a significant set of operational challenges. Although extensive research has been conducted on design and operational problems of automated manufacturing systems, many problems remain unsolved. In particular, the scheduling task, the control problem during the operati...

The Dutch institute of applied physics of TN0 and the Institute of Metals TN0 (Apeldoorn) have installed a flexible manufacturing system (FMS). The main components of this FA4S are a turret lathe, a machining centre and a transport system. One of the objectives of this system is to produce a wide variety of parts in small batches. Several interesting (short term) planning and scheduling problem...

This paper presents an advanced software system for solving the flexible manufacturing systems (FMS) scheduling in a job-shop environment with routing flexibility, where the assignment of operations to identical parallel machines has to be managed, in addition to the traditional sequencing problem. Two of the most promising heuristics from nature for a wide class of combinatorial optimization p...