Real–time part allocation in FMS under finite storage capacity

In this paper, we consider a manufacturing system composed of some sets of identical machines, each of these sets being associated with a finite input buffer. Each buffer can store the parts whose next operations have to be performed on one of the machines of the corresponding set. A part is launched in the system as soon as it is available. The goal consists of finding a schedule which minimises the completion time of the part, without changing the schedules of the parts that arrived earlier in the system. We propose a polynomial algorithm to solve this problem.