PROCESS DESIGN FOR EFFICIENT SCHEDULING

For manufacturing, management needs to make rapid, informed strategic decisions to react to changes in the market place. In many of these cases the decisions will give rise to a redesign of the manufacturing processes (layout, changes in product mix and volumes), which in turn changes the nature of the scheduling problems associated with the production facilities. However, the necessary skills and time in bridging the gap between design and scheduling are not available to allow managers to evaluate the many different high level decisions. In this paper, we propose an architecture which brings some scheduling capabilities to managers and planners. This approach is evaluated on two real-life design scenarios considered by a manufacturing company.