Basically five problems areas are addressed by operations research specialists in the manufacturing domain: theore- tical and practical aspectsin production planning, facility layout, inventory control, tool management and scheduling. Some of these problems can be solved off-line, while others must be treated as real-time problems impacted by the changing state of the system. Additionally, all of these problems have to be dealt with in an integrated systems framework. Several new topics have recently appeared in the scientific literature which now attract the interest of operations...

The subject of the book is to show recent developments and new perspectives of operations research in the area of production planning and control as they were presented on an international conference on this matter. Problems dealt with are general planning and modelling approaches in production, flexible manufacturing systems, production planning and control systems as well as computer integrated manufacturing, scheduling, lot-sizing, inventory control and quality assurance. Mathematical programming, control theory, simulations, genetic algorithms and neural networks are applied as solution...