Günther Zäpfel

Günter Fandel

Modern production concepts can be considered as an essential field of economics nowadays. They help to give valuable insights and thus provide important competitive advantages. There is a broad variety of new approaches to Production Planning and Control (PPC), Just-in-Time (JIT), Flexible Manufacturing Systems (FMS), Flexible Automation (FA), Automated Guided Vehicle Systems (AGVS), Total Quality Control (TQC), and Computer Integrated Manufacturing (CIM), all of which are indispensable cornerstones in this context. This book presents in a condensed and easy-to-comprehend form the different contributions of a group of internationally recommended scientists. The varied approaches to modern production concepts are not only based on theoretical foundations but also go one step further in that they present the implementation of these concepts and methods in detail. This close link with practical aspects will help to illuminate the theoretical material for researchers and students in universities. The book will be of major importance for practitioners involved in solving everyday industrial problems. The interdisciplinary nature of these contributions will help to create a new and valuable perspective on the field of production concepts.

Theory and Applications Proceedings of an International Conference, Fernuniversität, Hagen, FRG, August 20–24, 1990

Modern Production Concepts

Roland Braune

Michael Bögl

In many decision problems, e.g. from the area of production and logistics manage ment, the evaluation of alternatives and the determination of an optimal or at least suboptimal solution is an important but dif?cult task. For most such problems no ef?cient algorithm is known and classical approaches of Operations Research like Mixed Integer Linear Programming or Dynamic Pro gramming are often of limited use due to excessive computation time. Therefore, dedicated heuristic solution approaches have been developed which aim at providing good solutions in reasonable time for a given problem. However, such methods have two major drawbacks: First, they are tailored to a speci?c prob lem and their adaption to other problems is dif?cult and in many cases even impos sible. Second, they are typically designed to “build” one single solution in the most effective way, whereas most decision problems have a vast number of feasible solu tions. Hence usually the chances are high that there exist better ones. To overcome these limitations, problem independent search strategies, in particular metaheuris tics, have been proposed. This book provides an elementary step by step introduction to metaheuristics focusing on the search concepts they are based on. The ?rst part demonstrates un derlying concepts of search strategies using a simple example optimization problem.

Günther Zäpfel

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