AN INTEGRATED MODEL OF PROCESS PLANNING AND PRODUCTION SCHEDULING

Functional integration has taken the foreground in current manufacturing system development. Due to the fact that many of the functions in a manufacturing system are developing without a sense of integration, it becomes necessary that more importance be given to the integration of functions than the individual development of the functions itself. Process planning and job-shop scheduling are the two main information generators on the shop floor. Most of the current shop floor decisions are taken by the two functions without any feedback from each other. This leads to a situation wherein most of the created process plans become infeasible. This infeasibility leads to a unproductive shop floor. In this paper we propose an integrated model for process planning and job-shop scheduling. This approach can lead to more structured decision making on the shop floor and hence the creation of feasible plans.