Integrating Design and Planning Decisions for Reconfigurable Manufacturing Systems

Abstract

The dynamic nature of modern markets has rendered it imperative for manufacturing enterprises to evolve their practices in order to remain competitive. This has led to the development of reconfigurable manufacturing systems (RMS), which offer a solution to the aforementioned challenge. RMS is capable of adapting to fluctuations in demand in terms of both quantity and product type. This makes classical design and planning methods obsolete and necessitates the development of new tools that can effectively facilitate the implementation of RMS. This thesis focuses on process and production planning. The following problems are discussed: (i) process plan generation in a mono-objective context; (ii) process planning integrated with product sequencing in a multi-objective context; and (iii) lot sizing with a focus on exact solution approaches. All proposed approaches, whether exact or approximate, have demonstrated good solution quality through numerical experiments.