BATCHING AND ROUTING - 2 FUNCTIONS IN THE OPERATIONAL PLANNING OF FLEXIBLE MANUFACTURING SYSTEMS

The success of a Flexible Manufacturing System (FMS) is based on many factors such as the appropriate selection of parts, machine tools and material handling systems, effective planning and a full specification of the control software. In particular, planning must be carried out effectively at many different levels. The production operations of FMS's are planned at one of these levels, and this paper presents a new functional structure for this planning task, called operational planning. Four operational planning functions are identified: batching, routing, dispatching and sequencing. The models that are used to represent the batching and routing problems are presented in detail. The models are formulated as mixed integer programming models.