Optimum Production Scheduling of Multicommodity in Flow Line

The applications of computer control in production factories have been extended from the control of mass and energy to the production control. The control at this level comprises the formulation and alteration of work schedules in accordance with the progress of work, and it may be called the control of information. This paper deals with the flow line which is the most fundamental production line in the factory and proposes and verifies the optimal scheduling method. In the case of producing multicommodities by a flow line, the optimum schedule is the one which satisfies the demand for the respective products and minimizes the changeover loss. The branch-and-bound method is used to obtain an optimum schedule. The geometrical characteristics of the region in which the feasible schedules exist are used for calculating the lower bound of the objective function for the subset of feasible schedules.