Process family planning: An optimization-based approach

This study is aimed at providing companies with decision support in selecting the most suitable production processes for producing diverse customized products belonging to a family, in attempting to achieve production efficiency while utilizing the available manufacturing resources. One of the measurements of "best suitability" is the similarity of production processes for producing product family members. If the production processes are similar, there will be fewer production changeovers. This, in turn, helps achieve not only efficiency but also product quality. We develop an integer linear formulation for the selection of production routings for each member of a product family, and for the assignment of an execution mode to each operation in each selected routing. We report on computational experiments with an illustrative example instance.