Modelling and on-line scheduling of flexible manufacturing systems

The paper is concerned with the on-line scheduling problem for flexible manufacturing systems. Online scheduling in this context means that the next operation for each machine is determined from the actual state of the system and the actual demand and not from a fixed precomputed schedule. A compact and complete model for the system's dynamics is presented which has the form of a time-dependent recursive equation in a minimax algebra setting. This model is the basis of a two stage predictor-corrector algorithm which avoids the need of extensive simulation.