Short-term production scheduling of an automated manufacturing facility

We describe a new implementation of the Kimemia-Gershwin hierarchical policy for the real-time scheduling of flexible manufacturing systems. Major improvements result at all three levels of the policy. The algorithm simplification, resulting in substantial reductions of off-line and on-line computation time, is reported, as is the improvement in performance through the elimination of chattering. Simulation results based on a detailed model of a printed circuit card assembly facility are summarized.