Abstract
In flexible manufacturing systems (FMS), it is becoming more complex to manage operations of facilities, because of many requirements and constraints such as to increase product throughput, reduce work-in-process and keep the due date. Many scheduling methods have been proposed to solve this problem, yet they have not treated the case of finite buffer size.
This paper presents a scheduling method to solve the job shop scheduling problem with finite buffer size. The method realizes a hybrid scheduling system based on discrete event simulation by timed Petri-net and management of operational heuristics by temporal constraint propagation algorithm. By this method, it is made possible to generate a feasible schedule which satisfies the constraint of in-process storage capacities to circumvent the deadlock in automated production line.
