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

这项研究的目标是开发建模和控制方法，为计划和调度先进制造系统提供广泛的科学基础。推广运筹学、控制和仿真理论以及人工智能和灵活的计算机辅助环境方面的相关成果。认识到先进制造系统的复杂性，使得将制造要素整合到制造系统在分析上很困难，将制定一种系统的层次分解方法，以满足当今制造环境的需要。这种方法将提供将计划和调度制造设施的大型、复杂和一般难以处理的问题分解为许多较小和容易处理的通用任务的能力。还建议开发基于控制策略、仿真和人工智能的设计工具来解决这些一般任务。长期目标(在未来五年内)是创建一个综合的补充工具集合，能够利用实时信息来调整生产计划和调度，以便将中断和不确定性视为生产例行程序的正常部分。

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.