A heuristic approach for performance evaluation of hybrid manufacturing systems

Facilitating production-planning strategies for demand responsiveness has been well recognized as an operative means of accomplishing production efficiency. To support effective decision making in manufacturing environments, our study adopts graph-rewriting systems. We intend to focus on presenting a novel structure to help companies using hybrid make-to-stock (MTS)/make-to-order (MTO) production strategies to (1) identify conflicting workstations and the relations among them, (2) propose dialectical prioritization rules and techniques by means of graph-coloring concepts for resolving the conflicts, (3) reorganize the system, and evaluate performance.We prove that the graphs’ chromatic numbers in such systems are less than or equal to the total number of dummy nodes applied to the system by means of our proposed algorithm. Two examples of hybrid manufacturing systems are propounded in small and medium sizes and our proposed heuristic approach is applied. Finally, to ensure the rectitude of our methodology, the performance of the systems is assessed in terms of their chromatic numbers.

Keywords:

Graph coloring , Heuristics , Conflict recognition , Hybrid Make-To-Stock/Make-To-Order.