Decomposition Methods for Manufacturing System Scheduling: A Survey

Manufacturing is the application of labor, tools, machines, chemical and biological processing, to an original raw material by changing its physical and geometrical characteristics, in order to make finished products. Since the first industrial revolution, to accommodate the large-scale production, tremendous changes have happened to manufacturing through the innovations of technology, organization, management, transportation and communication. This work first reviews the high-volume low-mix process by focusing on the quantity production, transfer line and single model assembly line. Then, it reviews the high-volume high-mix process. For such a process type, mixed/multi model assembly line is usually adopted. Hence, two main decisions on them, i.e., balancing and, sequencing are reviewed. Thereafter, it discusses the low-volume high-mix process in detail. Then, technology gap and future work is discussed, and at last, conclusions are given.