System and method for manufacturing system design and shop scheduling using network flow modeling

摘要

A method and tool is provided to obtain an optimistic estimate or exact optimal value of an operational parameter for a realistic system model under investigation. The model includes components and paths arranged to process continuous or discrete commodities. The system could be a model of a manufacturing system with different machines processing multiple job types, with different sequences of operations at different stages. Constraints are applied to the abstracted network flow model, and a plurality of steady state network flows are performed. and combined to captures the transformation of the commodities from a first state to a final output state. The optimistic estimate of the realistic system model under investigation is then returned through use of a general purpose or custom solver. The method can be used to perform tradeoff studies between machine allocations, job mixes, operating costs, reliability and throughput, or to speed up scheduling and machine control.