Basically five problems areas are addressed by operations
research specialists in the manufacturing domain: theore-
tical and practical aspectsin production planning, facility
layout, inventory control, tool management and scheduling.
Some of these problems can be solved off-line, while others
must be treated as real-time problems impacted by the
changing state of the system. Additionally, all of these
problems have to be dealt with in an integrated systems
framework. Several new topics have recently appeared in the
scientific literature which now attract the interest of
operations researchers. These include distributed real-time
scheduling, hierarchical and heterarchical control systems,
integrated algorithms for design, process planning, and
equipment level programming, material handling in a finite
capacity resource environment, and designing and
implementing distributed data management systems. The
contributions of these proceedings represent new andunique
theoretical developments and applications related to these
new topics. They deal with modelling production structures
and applying expert systems or neural networks to production
systems. Mathematical programming, control theory,
simulation, genetic algorithms, tabu search, and simulated
annealing are applied as solutiton techniques.