Tool Allocation, Machine Loading, Part Routing and Storage Consideration in a Flexible Manufacturing System by Constraint Programming

ZEBALLOS, LUIS JAVIER; HENNING, GABRIELA

Rosario, Santa Fe, Argentina

Simposio; ASAI ´2005. Argentine Symposium on Artificial Intelligence; 2005

Sociedad Argentina de Informática e Investigación Operativa

Flexible Manufacturing Systems (FMSs) are one of the most popular approaches to reduce manufacturing costs, since they are able to cope with rapid changes in customer demands while maintaining the quality of products. Nevertheless, to derive an overall benefit from them, an efficient scheduling of constrained resources along the time horizon must be done. This paper introduces a new Constraint  Programming (CP) approach to the FMS scheduling problem for systems that work under a part movement policy. The proposed approach relies on a CP representation that accounts for process-ing times depending on machine-tool assignments, part routing constraints, tool allocation constraints and storage limitations. It is worth to remark that the for-mulation can handle the problem in a global way, without decoupling decisions.