Manufacturing Systems
Currently there is much interest in improving the productivity of manufacturing
systems. There are many types of manufacturing systems, ranging from job
shops for metal cutting, and flow shops for mass production of automobile
assembly, to re-entrant lines for semiconductor manufacturing. Of interest
are issues such as how to determine the lead time for manufacturing products,
how to schedule plants to minimize the lead time, etc. Manufacturing systems
can be modeled in many ways, for example they can be modeled as deterministic
systems, or as stochastic systems; they can be modeled as discrete systems,
or as continuous systems. Projects in this area use a variety of approaches
to study the modeling and analysis of manufacturing systems. The investigations
range from the theoretical study of the properties of large systems, to
synthesis of scheduling policies which are then tested in large scale simulation
of virtual plant models.