Production planning in automated manufacturing (Q1333020)

The book deals with production planning methods for flexible manufacturing systems, especially for systems producing printed circuit boards. In the most general case an assembly line consisting of numerically controlled machines of the same type is considered. The individual machines are connected by an automatic transportband, which enables a move of the processed printed circuit boards along the assembly line. At the same time, there are several boards on the transportband and when the transportband stays motionless, each of the boards is processed by one machine. Operations performed by a machine consist in placement of components on a board into prescribed locations. Any operation is done by an arm, which is provided by three heads, when each head carries one component. The components are stored in feeders, which are placed in slots along sides of machine workable. To be able to insert a component into its location, the head must be equipped with an appropriate tool, which is stored in a tool magazine, when not being mounted on the head. The authors focused on designing the assembly line, such that its productivity is maximal. The design of the assembly line contains workload determination for each machine, assignment for feeder types to machines, decision about which component each head should insert into the board, decision which component locations are to be served by the same pick-and-plane round of an arm, determination of the sequence of pick-and-place operations performed by each machine and assignment of the feeders to the slots. The complete design problem is decomposed to the above-mentioned subproblems, which are solved separately. Solving the subproblems, the authors formed mathematical models and investigated complexity and size of each subproblem. When the subproblem was not solvable due its size by an integer linear programming software package, the authors developed their own exact algorithm or heuristic method, made numerical experiments and reported on results. The exact approaches are mostly based on the cutting plane method (scheduling jobs of equal length) or on the column generation method (job grouping problem). The heuristic methods were formed in accordance with structure of the solved problem. A two-phase heuristic was developed to solve the three-dimensional assignment problem and the travelling salesman problem heuristic was used for the pick-and-place operations sequencing. General heuristic schemes were used to solve other subproblems such as the quadratic assignment problem, when interchange heuristic was used and the job grouping problem, which was solved by the tabu search and simulated annealing method. Generally, it is possible to say that the book is an excellent example of mathematical programming application to real life problems.