Part routing in Flexible Assembly Systems

This paper deals with the problem of part routing and scheduling in flexible manufacturing systems with the goal of increasing the throughput. The flexible system we consider is strongly characterized by the inclusion of assembly among the manufacturing operations to be performed on a mix of part batches. In particular, we point out hte logic structure of some basic decision problem through a set of combinatorial models. We analyze two basic assembly problems characterized by batches of large and small size, respectively