AN ALGORITHM FOR THE WEEKLY PRODUCTION PLANNING OF FLEXIBLE ASSEMBLY SYSTEMS

PPS-FAS is a local, short-term scheduling system inserted between the factory-level production planning and the real-time control system of a plant. In this paper the heuristic algorithm used by PPS-FAS to allocate the weekly production orders to the single days is described. The algorithm operates in two phases: the first phase generates an intermediate solution allocating jobs to the production days according to the objective of balanced utilization of all machines within each day; the second one improves the solution with respect to the objective of uniform utilization of all machines along the planning horizon.