Planning transport sequences for flexible manufacturing systems

Paper in proceeding, 2011

When designing a manufacturing system it is important to plan what the system should do. One important activity in most manufacturing systems is to transport products or resources between different positions. In a flexible manufacturing system it can be challenging to design and plan these transport operations due to their complex logical behavior. This paper presents a method that identifies, creates and visualizes these transport operations based on inputs from a standard virtual manufacturing tool and a high level product operation recipe. The planning of the created transport operations is transformed into a problem of finding a non-blocking solution for a discrete model of the product refinement.