It focuses on the setup management and operational planning issues associated with productive use of these expensive resources. The concept of replanning is introduced to adapt to changes in the production environment by explicitly considering the initial state of the system. The partial setup strategy is suggested as a means of efficient adaptation and as a strategy that subsumes other setup strategies encountered in practice and the literature. These concepts are applied to the optimization of a single placement machine producing multiple products. The results of using partial setups are compared with other commonly used strategies.
Experimental results suggest significant gains at the single machine level.
Future research is being pursued to improve the solution procedures and extend these replanning concepts to the line level. Click here to view the full paper on line. Click here for the full paper in MS Word format.