Manufacturing Flow Control using Biased Minimum Feedback

Manufacturing flow control aims to adjust execution sequencing of a finite number of job types entering a manufacturing system, so as to stabilise work-in-process (WIP) and increase performance, under consideration of periodic non-negligible setup changes. This paper presents an event driven flow control formalism in which the setup scheduling problem is collapsed onto a finite automata termed Biased Minimum Feedback (BMF). BMF is shown to have distinct operating modes under various job arrival sequence correlations. A simulation study on the control of a flexible manufacturing cell uncovers work-in-process levels which optimise setup frequency and downstream assembly performance under high-variety production operations.