ABSTRACT
Process planning is a flexible task. Several processes may be generated that meets engineering drawing specifications. On the other hand, scheduling is the process of arranging, controlling, and optimizing work and workloads in a production process. The transfer of data from process planning to scheduling is by a fixed routine, thus it becomes a constraint to perform production scheduling. Integration of Process Planning and Scheduling (IPPS) opens the ability of communication and makes the routine a variable. While this improves scheduling flexibility tremendously, and also increases the number of scheduling options, it does get very complex mathematically. Therefore, in this chapter, an integration approach is proposed based on the scheduling rules using a dynamic planning method. Simulation of the proposed method indicates that it is practical and can eliminate many disruptions on shop floor such as machine break, bottlenecks, newly arrived orders, etc. The mathematical research power within scheduling may be directed toward generating economical rules, such as, selecting not the best process, but the one that results in increasing the company profit.
