A Constraint Programming Approach to FMS Scheduling. Consideration of Storage and Transportation Resources

Flexible manufacturing systems (FMS) require efficient scheduling strategies to achieve their principal advantage of being able to combine high flexibility with high productivity. This paper presents a novel constraint programming (CP) formulation addressing the FMS scheduling problem for systems that work under the operational policy of part movement. The formulation addresses some critical features found in these problems and proposes a search strategy to speed/up the solution process. This work also presents an ad-hoc procedure, based on different initialisation points, that aims at making problems tractable when their size is big enough to make difficult the attainment of good quality solutions in a reasonable CPU time.