Dynamic Scheduling and Routing for Flexible Manufacturing Systems that Have Unreliable Machines

This paper presents a method for real-time scheduling and routing of material in a Flexible Manufacturing System (FMS). It extends the earlier scheduling work of Kimemia and Gershwin in which the FMS model includes machines that fail at random times and stay down for random lengths of time. The new element is the capability of different machines to perform some of the same operations. The times that different machines require to perform the same operation may differ. This paper includes a model, its analysis, a real-time algorithm, and examples.