Scheduling has become an attractive area for artificial intelligence researchers. On other hand, in today's real-world manufacturing systems, the importance of an efficient maintenance schedule program cannot be ignored because it plays an important role in the success of manufacturing facilities. A maintenance program may be considered as the heath care of manufacturing machines and equipments...

Manufacturing flexibility is one of the key determinants of development of modern production systems. The article presents the importance of flexibility factor in the process of manufacturing systems development during the 20 th century. In particular, craft manufacturing, dedicated manufacturing systems (DMS) and flexible manufacturing systems (FMS) were characterized. Finally, actual problems...

The changes in manufacturing systems and industrial structure brought about by the development of new, computer-based flexible technologies has been a subject of growing debate during the last decade. There is a lack of solid empirical support for almost all hypotheses developed in this debate since data on the relative use of various manufacturing systems are not available for an econometric a...