SCHEDULING AND PLANNING OF ELECTRONICS MANUFACTURING OPERATIONS - A CASE-STUDY OF THE MADEMA APPROACH

This paper describes the application of MADEMA, a simulation tool based on artificial intelligence, to the production planning and scheduling process of a flexible flow line which produces printed circuit boards (PCBs). MADEMA performs the production planning, scheduling and control tasks of manufacturing systems, based on a multiple-criteria decision-making technique suitable for flexible manufacturing. Two different combinations of criteria, provided by MADEMA, are applied to the industrial test-case at hand, and the related results are discussed. In addition, other conventional scheduling policies are applied and their results evaluated, based on a comparison with MADEMA policies. The proposed work shows that the multiple criteria technique provides better results.