CURRENT AND FUTURE-ISSUES CONCERNING FMS SCHEDULING

The competitive challenge facing the American manufacturing sector is to overcome the tradeoff between flexibility and efficiency. The development of automated systems, such as flexible manufacturing systems (FMS), has helped in this endeavor, Appropriate scheduling schemes must be established to maximize the performance of these systems. The objective of this paper is to analyze FMS scheduling research and predict the issues of future FMS scheduling problems. A classification framework helps identify FMS types, types of scheduling schemes, and helps to define interactions between these categories. FMS vendors, users, and researchers should find this effort useful.