Production Planning of Individual Machine Systems: a Rate Based Approach Using Similarity

Abstract

Production planning and scheduling is one of the most important technical activities of enterprises in the manufacturing and engineering industries. In this paper we define the concept of production rate at different hierarchy levels of production planning and scheduling. At the lowest level it appears as material removal rate (MRR). At the highest level it means the rate of activities of the current project. In the customer-oriented machine industry a project can be defined as a set of abstract engineering activities (e.g. mechanical design, part manufacturing, mechanical assembly, electrical and electronic design, electrical and electronic assembly, etc.) that must be completed by a specified due date. The main task of production planning is to distribute the necessary production load-fractions to the resources within the allowable time window in a quasi-optimal way. In project based production modeling the constrained optimum problems can be effectively solved by planning of the production rate as a function of time. In creating the planning models the similarity of projects can be advantageously utilized. The paper gives an overview of the theoretical background and summarizes the expectable benefits of the proposed approach. Some initial application experience obtained so far at a Hungarian factory will also be outlined.