Planning and scheduling for agile manufacturers: The Pantex Process Model

Abstract

Effective use of resources that are shared among multiple products or processes is critical for agile manufacturing. This paper describes the development and implementation of a computerized model to support production planning in a complex manufacturing system at the Pantex Plant, a US Department of Energy facility. The model integrates two different production processes (nuclear weapon disposal and stockpile evaluation) that use common facilities and personnel at the plant. The two production processes are characteristic of flow-shop and job-shop operations. The model reflects the interactions of scheduling constraints, material flow constraints, and the availability of required technicians and facilities. Operational results show significant productivity increases from use of the model.

PICO: An Object-Oriented Framework for Branch and Bound

“…Sandia National Laboratories has developed and implemented the Pantex Process Model [21] to support the planning and scheduling activities at Pantex, a US Department of Energy production plant in Amarillo, Texas. The plant simultaneously supports three major DOE programs -nuclear weapon disposal, stockpile evaluation, and stockpile maintenance -which share its facilities, technicians, and equipment.…”

“…We focused on one piece of the PPM, namely the Evaluation Planning Module (EPM) used to project facility and technician utilization over a given planning horizon (typically a year). Multiple mathematical formulations of this problem are introduced in [17,21,22].…”

Nanosatellite Program at Sandia National Laboratories

“…Sandia National Laboratories has developed and implemented a decision support tool called the Pantex Process Model, or PPM (Kjeldgaard, et al, 1998). The PPM is a computerized model that supports planning and scheduling activities at Pantex, a US Department of Energy production plant in Amarillo, Texas.…”