Strategic Manufacturing Initiative: Development of a Science Base for Planning and Scheduling Manufacturing Systems

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The objective of this research effort is to develop modeling and control methodologies that provide a broad science base for planning and scheduling advanced manufacturing systems. Relevant achievements in operations research, control and simulation theory as well as artificial intelligence and flexible computer aided environments will be extended. Recognizing the complexity of advanced manufacturing systems which renders the integration of manufacturing elements into a manufacturing system analytically intractable, a systematic hierarchical decomposition methodology that addresses the needs of today's manufacturing environment will be developed. This methodology will provide the capability to decompose the large, complex and generally intractable problem of planning and scheduling a manufacturing facility to many smaller and tractable generic tasks. Development of control policies, simulation and artificial intelligence based design tools to address these generic tasks is also proposed. The long term objective (in the next five years) is to create an integrated collection of complementary tools that will be capable to make use of information in real-time to adjust production planning and scheduling so that disruptions and uncertainties are treated as a normal part of the production routine.