Fei Qiao

Manufacturing systems with reentrant flow, which means that product items revisit several machines for multiple times during their production routes, are considered as highly complex systems. Its reentrance feature challenges the scheduling problem of such systems. A kind of drum-buffer-rope (DBR) technique proves to be a viable, robust method for complex manufacturing scheduling. A new kind of DBR based scheduling for reentrant manufacturing with a novel strategy is investigated. First, the multiple reentrant production flow is transferred into non-reentrant layered production lines. Then, the DBR scheduling algorithm is studied, and a layered scheduling algorithm (LSA) are proposed. The proposed DBR based scheduling strategy as well as the algorithm are demonstrated via a numerical simulation case study.

Biography: Dr. Fei Qiao is presently a Professor of the School of Electronics & Information Engineering, Tongji University, Shanghai, China. Since last November she is doing visit research in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering of New Jersey Institute of Technology. She received her Ph. D. degree from the School of Economics & Management, Tongji University in 1997. She received her M.S. and B.S. degrees from the Department of Electrical Engineering, Tongji University in 1993 and in 1990 respectively. She joined Tongji University since 1993 as a faculty member. From 2001 to 2002, she was a Humboldt scholar at the Institute of Production Systems, Ruhr University-Bochum, Germany. Her current research interests include planning and scheduling of complex manufacturing systems, intelligent algorithms, modeling and optimization, and system integration.