Production Planning and Scheduling

The main issue with production planning is the amount of data and how accurate that data
is and all the

The way you schedule depends on where your cost is, could be the components themselves,
raw materials, or the tools themselves(if carbide)

Planning
 What to make, what quantities and when
 Planning horizons, or planning buckets of time – could be a day or week depending
on the quantity of parts being made
 How to fill it up
Scheduling
 What resources to be used and during which periods
 i.e what fixtures and tools are available and how to allocate
 resources = fixtures, cutting tools, people?
Control
 how you are able to identify whether the production is going according to the plan
and schedule
 the current stage of production and where any corrective action is needed
 control can be feedback from the machine, or resource going down

Hierarchical structure for production planning and control

Production activity control

- collects feedback from shop floor and feeds back to compare against master
production plan and schedule to control

‘Job’ can be manufacture of assembly, or sub-assembly – job can also be a batch of parts

Strategies for production planning & control

- Material Requirement Planning(MRP) / Manufacturing Resource Planning (MRP II)
- Just in time (JIT)
- Optimised production technology (OPT)

MRP:
Forecast and customer orders -> BoM checked and the net number of components required
is calculated by subtracting the number of components already available in the inventory.
Note: the minimum stock maintenance level is also factored into the net requirements
calculations -> production schedule for net requirements is generated based on push system
(producing goods according to a demand forecast)

MRP II
Closed-loop MRP version of MRP where interrelated production plans are prepared with
cross-functional considerations from other departments such as business plan, financial
targets, marketing plan, production plan, resource requirement plan.

MRP MRP II

Stands for Material Requirements Stands for Manufacturing

Planning. Resource Planning.

Developed in 1970s. Developed in 1980s.

Provides an information that is

useful to all functional areas
Widely used approach for production and encourages cross-
planning and scheduling in industry. functional interactions.

Aims to control relevant

material flows and production
capacity while also taking into
Aims at releasing and managing account the relationship
manufacturing orders and purchasing between these material flows
requisitions. and the required capacity.

MRP is simply about ensuring the It take care of all other aspects
materials which are available to of a job including ordering,
manufacture a specific part in a specific tracking inventory and ensuring
volume. capacity.

It takes inputs all in order to make sure you MRP II uses additional data
have the right amount of from accounting records and
materials/labor/machinery on hand at any sales for further analysis and
given time to satisfy the market or your forecasting of manufacturing
company production goals. requirements.

MRP II also considers the control aspect of monitoring the progress of these plans so that so
that it can be adjusted according to current requirements and system status

JIT: eliminating waste

OPT:
Total focus is on making money.
The main criteria are throughput, inventory, operating expenses
The goal of OPT is to increase throughput and simultaneously decreasing inventory and
operation expenses through realistic and optimised schedules.
OPT is an extension to MRP/MRP II brings together JIT and MRPII into a westernized JIT.

Production Scheduling of FMCs

Main point: with FMC – we try to make parts in one hit, or two-setups if the parts are dual-
sided.

2 major definitions of scheduling:

- Scheduling is required when a set of resources in a manufacturing system must be
shared to make a variety of different products during the same time period
- Scheduling is allocating machines and other resources(tooling and fixtures) to
jobs/operations within jobs and subsequent time-phasing of the jobs based on
individual resources

Lecture notes: good scheduling strategy, tasks involved

Scheduling Rules:
Static + Dynamic
Forward and backward scheduling

Combined Machine Loading

You have a due date interval – which can be a day or week. The longer it is, the more
flexibility there is to optimize the workflow and economising on jobs
Typical loading policies:
- Single-machine loading (SML)
o All parts of a transfer batch are made on 1 machine
o Transfer batch=no. of parts made in one hit(if pallet =4 parts, transfer batch-
4)
- Multi machine loading (MML)
o All jobs across all machines
- Combined machine loading (CML)
o Using single-machine loading, and if due date cannot be met, then the jobs
are split across all machines

Why use MML over SML?

- To bring forward a delivery date
- But its more expensive because tools and fixtures are being duplicated (an issue
unless you’ve got fixtures which are generic across part types)
- SML is more common and it is more efficient
- MML is the most inefficient but it minimizes the jobs’ overall processing times and
the WIP

How to decide CML loading? i.e which job to split? You could decide to split based on:
- TJ: tardy job – job that will miss deadline
- LPT: longest processing time
- Jobs requiring minimum number of tools to be processed
- Job with smallest number of transfer batches
- Jobs with smallest number of transfer batches

IN reality, for CML, the cell manager would decide based on a set of factors and
characteristics to make the most economical decision. i.e if two jobs had similar LPTs, you
would not split the one that was slightly longer if it used a higher number of cutting tools
because it would increase the setups. So various factors would need to be considered.

- MML had the highest number of tool changes across all strategies
 - For a mixed job profile(with short and long jobs) CML based on LPT had the best
advantage in comparison to others

Conclusions:
- SML is the most economical method particularly with larger cells(with more
machines)
- MML results in the lowest WIP with a balanced workload for the machines
- CML can be used to achieve the benefits of both but requires greater
planning/time/efforts due to considerations of available resources, tooling and
fixturing.

CML notes from paper:

 For short jobs: CML-tj > CML-lpt because the jobs generally have a shorter processing
time, hence dividing these resulted in more tool changes.
 For long jobs: both algorithms had similar performance
 For mixed jobs:
o CML-lpt – there were fewer jobs with long processing times, hence less jobs
have been divided- so less tools changed
o CML-tj -

In summary in applications where jobs are either all short or long, the application of CML-lpt does not perform
very well, and results in the division of many jobs. This algorithm is particularly suitable for applications with a
mixture of short and long jobs where splitting a small number of long jobs will eliminate the problem of many
tardy jobs.

In a similar manner, it can be argued that the application of CML-tj will provide the best performance in cases
where tardy jobs are short and are required to be split only a few times to solve the lateness of jobs.

CML-lpt: for a mixture of short and long jobs where splitting a small number of long jobs will
eliminate the problem of many tardy jobs.

CML-tj: cases where tardy jobs are short and required only to be split a few times to solve
lateness
Other paper: Simultaneous Scheduling of Workpieces, Fixtures and Cutting Tools within
Flexible Machining Cells – Multi flow scheduling system

 The tool and fixture planning activities are often performed at a much later period,
after workpiece schedules are generated.
 Tool and fixture planning is done indepently of workpiece scheduling

This is due to:

i) data relating to the tooling and fixturing requirements of jobs being held in a range of
computer files within different software packages, because in addition to planning
activities, such data is required by other tooling and fixturing activities, such as tool
and fixture assembly, tool presetting and inventory control.
ii) traditional scheduling techniques and the available computing power could not deal
with complexity of combining these planning activities and be able to generate
schedules within reasonable time limits.

However, the recent advancements in computer hardware enable ‘parallel generation of

schedules’ where all three considered simultaneously.

More importantly, the greatest advantage of simulation models is their sophisticated

techniques and ability to deal with randomness and the dynamic nature of FMC.

These planning strategies implemented within FMSS divided in three categories, namely
 workpiece dominated
o generation of schedules for the most effective flow of workpieces through
the machining cell – MML(multimachine loading)
 tool dominated
o the most efficient use of cutting tools so that the manufacturing cost relating
to these elements can be minimised. – tool cluster based job allocation
 fixture dominated.
o minimising delays caused by a shortage of fixtures in scenarios where a
limited number of fixtures of a particular type is available (e.g. in the case of
specially designed fixtures), and minimising the number of fixture assembly
and disassembly operations in scenarios with the modular fixtures.
o
MFSS is to harmonise the flows of the workpieces, fixtures and cutting tools by considering
the interaction of a number of scheduling rules for cutting tools and fixtures together.
The primary inputs to the MFSS are an unsequenced list of jobs for a specified
manufacturing horizon and the machining cell status at the start of this horizon.

The primary outputs from the MFSS are three synchronised schedules for the control of the
principal material flows.

Three modes of operation are implemented based on workpiece dominated, fixture

dominated and tool dominated approaches, as illustrated in figure 3. One of these
operational modes is selected for the generation of the triple flow schedules by the user,
based on the specific requirements of the manufacturing horizon. Alternatively where
appropriate, schedules based on all three modes can be generated and analysed to select
the one which produces the best manufacturing performance. It should be noted that with
all three modes of operation of the MFSS, individual schedules for the flow of workpieces,
fixtures and cutting tools are generated. These modes of operation are described in more
detail below.

Outputs of MFSS :
The schedules generated by the multi-flow scheduling system can be both in the format of
Gantt charts or work-to-lists.

The output is that the operator can view different layouts of the generated schedule for
greater control and understanding of the production plan:
 part types versus machines (workpiece flow)
 machines versus jobs (workpiece flow)
 part types versus toolkits (tool flow)
 toolkits versus machines (tool flow
 part types versus fixtures (fixture flow)
 fixture versus machines (fixture flow)

Benefits of MFSS for FMCs

 The operators/planners time is saved as these three planning activities are
carried out simultaneously.
 As soon as the workpiece schedule is generated, the tool and fixture plans can
be issued to the tool room/store and fixturing stations, allowing a longer time
period to prepare for the tooling and fixturing requirements.
 The addition of ‘new jobs’ or changes in ‘job priorities’ can be more easily
accommodated, as the three schedules are updated simultaneously.
 Cohesion introduced by producing tool and fixture schedules in addition to a
workpiece schedule improves the production control process. In addition, the
information on the progress of schedules retrieved by shop floor data collection
can be utilised more effectively to achieve an efficient monitoring procedure.

The flexibility offered by the MFSS through the selection of a framework of planning
strategies, is also particularly advantageous in applications where the job throughput
requirements for a manufacturing horizon changes significantly on a regular basis.

The requirement for a large number of cutting tools and fixtures and the related tooling and
fixturing activities in this short period, often results in operational bottlenecks in the tool
room/store and the fixturing stations. Therefore, any reduction through the use of the MFSS,
in tool and fixture requirements not only has a direct effect on the manufacturing cost, but
also results in less machine down time caused due to delays for tools and fixtures availability.