Feeding parts to an assembly line by several production units

The problem of production control with disturbances for processing assembly-line parts is introduced. A flexible manufacturing system is considered including an assembly-line with several supplementary units, each unit producing different parts for the line. Each unit has several possible speeds which are subject to disturbances. The outputs of the units are not tranferable, to a unit cannot produce parts for the other units. For each unit's output there is a pregiven deterministic rate of demand of the assembly-line. If at the routine time point there is a shortage of any types of parts the whole FMS is in shortage. Given the deterministic rates of demand for each unit and the confidence probability for the FMS not to be in shortage, the decision-maker determines at the routine control point both the speeds to be introduced at that point for all units and the next control point. The objective functions are: to minimize the operating costs during the planning horizon and to minimize the number of control points. A stochastic optimization formulation is presented followedby a heuristic solution.