BUS606: Operations and Supply Chain Management

The task of process planning involves the interpretation and conversion of the product design for its manufacture.

According to Ferreira & Wysk, there is often more than one alternative resource to perform an operation, and consequently to manufacture a part. Colosimo et al. point out that, normally, the elaboration of process plans does not consider alternative resources, although Zattar et al. highlight the importance of the results achieved with the use of alternative plans.

Deja & Siemiatkowski point out that the availability of process plans with alternatives is an important factor to integrate product design, process planning and production scheduling.

Fung et al. mention that the capacity of each machine and the operations that it can be perform are well defined. However, some operations can be performed on more than one machine, which results in the dynamic aspect of process planning.

Lv et al. point out that studies of virtual manufacturing cells focus, in addition to layout, algorithms for virtual cell design, process planning, and process planning models.

Arkat & Ghahve identified that most researches assumed that set-up times established in process plans are independent of production sequencing, thus being neglected or included in processing times, which simplifies the analysis but affects the outcome of the solution.

Dakov et al. emphasize the use of virtual cell layout in conjunction with process planning. They developed a theoretical model for the cellular arrangement based on workstations and an algorithm that elaborates the process planning simultaneously.

Morales & Ronconi considered mathematical models to solve the production scheduling problem of the classic job shop model, evaluating six different formulations and solve 45 problems from the literature. They consider the static deterministic case, where the processing time of each operation and the sequence of operations for each task are known and not variant, and all machines and tasks are available at the beginning of processing.

Fuchigami et al. evaluated 12 methods to minimize the total production sequencing time (makespan). The setup times were considered and their emphasis was on flexible flow lines.

There is a gap in the literature in the effective comparison between different types of layouts, in such a way that it can help the shop floor professional to specify the best layout for each scenario. In this context, this study seeks to analyze and compare the performance of three different types of layout through experiments based on simulations under conditions of a make-to-order (MTO) manufacturing system (i.e. a system that produces parts to satisfy orders with specific due dates). The method used in this work is presented in section 3.