Forty Sixth CIRP Conference on Manufacturing Systems 2013 Editorial

Nowadays manufacturing companies are coerced to become more flexible to adapt their internal processes quickly and economically to the volatile external situations. In this paper, we develop a cost model with respect to the capacity envelope concept. Generic flexibility measures are used and described by numerous influence factors and constraints. Furthermore, the cost model will be demonstrated as a mixed-integer linear model and is finally integrated in a decision support system for mid-term production planning. The resulting problem can be solved with commonly available standard solvers. Finally, we will show numerical results from practice. © 2013 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. Selection and/or peer-review under responsibility of Professor Pedro Filipe do Carmo Cunha