Abstract: In trial-manufacture mould production, parts with different routings and processing time are machined first and then assembled. The inconsistent progress of related parts will affect assembly start-up, while high-frequency accidents such as rework and repair interfere with progress coordination. Real-time decision-making dispatching rules can coordinate production progress timely, but decentralized rules are difficult to coordinate many parts in workshops with fluctuating and unbalanced workload. Workload control method will be introduced to balance the task queues and improve the coordination efficiency of rules. A multi-level hierarchical method with coupling release control, machine selection and dispatching rules is constructed. The excellent performance of the proposed method and the inherent relationship between collaboration-oriented and setup-saving priority rules in different control levels are studied by simulation experiments.

Key words: flexible assembly job-shop, sequence-dependent, progress coordination, workload control, priority dispatching rules