The Generalized Network Model: Algorithms and Application to Manufacturing Operations

Abstract

The growth of computer industry has had a profound influence on many areas; Management and Manufacturing Sciences are undoubtedly two of them. The exploitation of the available computational power of the new technology has rendered possible the development and solution of realistic models, which capture many of the intricacies and take into account the plethora of data involved in most of the real-life problems. Network programming is one of the most extensively studied areas, and there has been a lot of work carried out on network formulation and computer implementation techniques. The major reasons that network modelling is such a popular tool among decision-makers are: i) many of the problems coming up in real-life applications have a network structure; the shortest path, assignment, scheduling, transportation and transshipment problems are the most common ones, ii) the pictorial nature of the model permits the easy statement of the problem, the conceptualzation, interpretation and verification of it and of the optimal solution, and also, the communication of relating ideas to non-scientific staff, iii) finally, the enhancement of the pure network model to the so-called Generalized Network (GN) model makes the model applicable to a great variety of problems ranging from integrated production and distribution planning to such exotic areas like file reduction and plastic-limits analysis.