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

这项研究工作的目标是开发建模和控制方法，为先进制造系统的计划和调度提供广泛的科学基础。拓展运筹学、控制与仿真理论、人工智能和柔性计算机辅助环境等方面的相关成果。认识到先进制造系统的复杂性，使制造要素集成到制造系统的分析难以解决，将开发一种系统的层次分解方法，以满足当今制造环境的需要。该方法将提供将大型、复杂且通常难以处理的制造设施计划和调度问题分解为许多较小且易于处理的通用任务的能力。还提出了开发控制策略、仿真和基于人工智能的设计工具来解决这些通用任务。长期目标（未来五年）是创建一个集成的互补工具集合，能够实时利用信息来调整生产计划和调度，从而将中断和不确定性视为生产流程的正常组成部分。

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.