Constraint-based master scheduling problem.

Abstract

In the manufacturing industry, many problems pertain to part management, assembly and scheduling. Products today largely consist of a series of components which themselves can, in turn, consist of more components. The assembly of a product becomes an exercise in assembling all of the sub-components in a timely fashion. Sometimes these sub-components are available in stock, while other times, they must be manufactured using other sub-components. Thus, inventory management of these sub-components becomes crucial in the manufacturing of products on schedule. This thesis looks at the problem of managing inventory so as to maximize a profit function associated with customer orders whose ordered parts are assembled on time. Because this problem is known to be NP-hard, we propose efficient heuristic methods for this problem. Two of these methods are implemented and tested against each other.