Basically five problems areas are addressed by operationsresearch specialists in the manufacturing domain: theore-tical and practical aspectsin production planning, facilitylayout, inventory control, tool management and scheduling.Some of these problems can be solved off-line, while othersmust be treated as real-time problems impacted by thechanging state of the system. Additionally, all of theseproblems have to be dealt with in an integrated systemsframework. Several new topics have recently appeared in thescientific literature which now attract the interest ofoperations researchers. These include distributed real-timescheduling, hierarchical and heterarchical control systems,integrated algorithms for design, process planning, andequipment level programming, material handling in a finitecapacity resource environment, and designing andimplementing distributed data management systems. Thecontributions of these proceedings represent new anduniquetheoretical developments and applications related to thesenew topics. They deal with modelling production structuresand applying expert systems or neural networks to productionsystems. Mathematical programming, control theory,simulation, genetic algorithms, tabu search, and simulatedannealing are applied as solutiton techniques.
