Formation and scheduling are the most important decisions in the virtual modular manufacturing system; however, the global performance optimization of the system may be sacrificed via the superposition of two independent decision-making results. The joint decision of formation and scheduling is...

The production planning problem of flexible manufacturing system (FMS) concerns with decisions that have to be made before an FMS begins to produce parts according to a given production plan during an upcoming planning horizon. The main aspect of production planning deals with machine loading...