M. Lucertini – författare

Combinatorial problems have been from the very beginning part of the history of mathematics. By the Sixties, the main classes of combinatorial problems had been defined. During that decade, a great number of research contributions in graph theory had been produced, which laid the foundations for most of the research in graph optimization in the following years. During the Seventies, a large number of special purpose models were developed.The impressive growth of this field since has been strongly determined by the demand of applications and influenced by the technological increases in computing power and the availability of data and software. The availability of such basic tools has led to the feasibility of the exact or well approximate solution of large scale realistic combinatorial optimization problems and has created a number of new combinatorial problems.

This volume aims at giving an updated account of the most relevant issues in the area of Flexible Manufacturing Systems with special emphasis to the problems of Simulation, Modelling, Planning, Scheduling, Economical Evaluation. A tutorial description of these topics is provided from the perspective of Operations Research. Both stochastic and deterministic models are taken into consideration and real world applications are considered. An annotated bibliography is provided at the end of the volume. Contributions: Akella: Real time part dispatch in flexible assembly, test and manufacturing systems; Arbib, Lucertini, Nicol�: Optimization models for FMS; Archetti, Sciomachen: Development, analysis and simulation of Petri net models: an application to AGV systems; Buzacott: Flexible models of FMS, and Modelling FMS; Filippini, Rovetta: Economic aspects in factory automation in relation to system flexibility; Fishman: Statistical considerations in the simulation of FMS; Jovane: Flexible automation, a need for industry - a challenge for research; Maione, Fanti, Turchiano: Large scale Markov chain modelling of transfer lines; Romanin-Jacur: FMS queueing network.Models theory and applications; Serafini, Ukovich, Kirchner, Giardina, Tiozzo: Job shop scheduling, a case study; Taylor: Advanced robotics in FMS; Villa: Hierarchical architectures for production planning and control; Deserti, Giraldo: FMS, a classification of recent literature.

Working Conference on Stochastic Programming held in Gargnano (Italy), September 15-21, 1983