Flexibility of Cyclic Scheduling - Essay Example

Scheduling refers to the concept of allocating available resources over time to effectively plan for the execution of production orders in a manufacturing facility with its available processing machines and manufacturing systems (Lankford, Chapter 9.8). Depending on the demand for that which is being manufactured, a master production schedule will be made available and scheduling meets the requirements for production that are stated in the master production schedule. Thus, if automobiles or cellular phones are being manufactured in a facility, then the daily, monthly, or weekly production output for the previously mentioned outputs will be mentioned in the master production schedule, as determined by the market or supplier commitments. However, the employed manpower, processing machine, or production line capacity and material for production must be adequate for the required levels of production and this means that scheduling is about optimally assigning available resources to meet production targets. Thus, scheduling is more complex than the mere execution of jobs for production, and depending on the nature of the production or manufacturing plant and the production philosophy, such as Just in Time or JIT, manufacturing philosophy the right levels of manufacturing inputs, such as man and material will have to be assigned to the right production machines at the right time and in the proper sequence to produce a complex product that needs tasks to be performed in a certain sequence.

A master production schedule is a management tool that transforms the production objectives for a manufacturing facility into an engineering plan that helps with detailed production planning. If such a plan is to be sensible, it must consider the capacity of production machines, manufacturing cells, and shops. Thus, depending on the nature of the manufacturing system and the manufacturing techniques, different techniques for scheduling will be employed. Agile manufacturing systems, lean manufacturing systems, just-in-time systems, and flexible manufacturing systems will have different scheduling strategies. Various mathematical models for scheduling on the previously mentioned that try to optimize processing time, cost, deviations from the mean production rate, product load, and subassembly load using a variety of techniques are possible (Leung, Chapter 3) and (Brucker, Chapter 1). Sequencing and allocation of tasks are often interrelated, but it is difficult to model the interrelationship between the two.

Sequencing refers to the proper definition of the order in which jobs are to be run on machines or the order in which tasks are to be performed. In certain manufacturing operations that are required to deliver complex products, such as automobiles, aircraft, or cellular phones, sequencing can be important because, without a properly sequenced execution of tasks, it will be impossible to correctly produce what is being made. An automobile has to be built on a chassis that must be fitted with an engine, transmission, and wheels. The proper sequencing for manufacturing will be to get the chassis delivered first, fit the transmission, suspension, and engine, and then the wheels. Ordering the wheels first from a supplier without a chassis will be inappropriate for just-in-time manufacturing because the wheels will have to be stored until the engine and the suspension arrives this will take up storage space and it will also cost more to do so.

Flexible manufacturing systems, or FMS, contain machine flexibility and routing flexibility to absorb changes in production volume and capability or capacity that makes it possible for such systems to be rapidly adjusted to produce various product types quickly or to respond to production demand (De Toni, Pp. 1587 – 1592). FMS is a computer-controlled arrangement of semi-independent workstations with machines that can have their tools changed and material handling systems that link the workstations (Halevi, Pp. 159 – 161). Thus, FMS is of particular interest in the real-world manufacturing of today in which a manufacturing unit is expected to be sufficiently flexible to cater to varying products and volumes. FMS systems, in which changeover times for changing the mode of production are also important for scheduling and these are often highly automated and use various computer-based software techniques for scheduling and optimizing manufacturing (Wang, Pp. 644 – 645) and (Das, Pp. 1 – 2).