Although the national importance of the semiconductor industry is widely acknowledged, it is
only recently that the production planning and scheduling problems encountered in this …

This paper reviews recent work on the development of analytical models of Flexible
Manufacturing Systems (FMSs). The contributions of each of the groups concerned with …

We consider an assembly line with m stations in series having finite capacity buffers.
Blocking occurs when buffers are full. There are M different types of products to be …

One of the most important methods in dealing with the optimization of large, complex
systems is that of hierarchical decomposition. The idea is to reduce the overall complex …

The authors consider general flexible manufacturing/assembly/disassembly systems with
the following features:(i) there are several types, each with given processing time …

In this article we investigate the modeling and computational aspects of the product-of-
exponentials (POE) formula for robot kinematics. While its connections with Lie groups and …

Publisher Summary This chapter discusses basic ingredients of Hierarchical Production
Planning (HPP) systems and describes models for single and multi-stage systems. Some …

Consider a manufacturing line that produces parts of several types. Each part must be
processed by at most one machine in each of several banks of machines. This paper …

The synthesis of operating policies for manufacturing systems is discussed. These are
feedback laws that respond to potentially disruptive events. Laws are developed that are …

The production control of a single-product manufacturing system with arbitrary number of
machine states (failure modes) is discussed. The objective is to find a production policy that …