Book Description

Production engineering plays a crucial role in enhancing industrial productivity. Interest in production research is therefore growing rapidly and, in only a few short years, terms such as FMS, JIT, expert systems, CIM, and robotics, have become indispensable to a production engineer's vocabulary. These new technologies have led to different kinds of design and implementation problems in areas such as production planning, scheduling, warehousing, facilities layout, inventory control, etc. and have renewed production researchers' interest in solving these problems. While advances and new solutions and procedures are regularly shared via technical journals, researchers and practitioners meet periodically to discuss their latest finds and occasionally these findings are published in book form to accelerate dissemination of information. This book is such an effort. It contains 111 papers selected from the 450 presented during the IXth International Conference on Production Research. The papers chosen provide new information and new algorithms, designs and application, or promote new ideas and points of view.