Production Engineering and Management under Fuzziness

Book excerpt: Production engineering and management involve a series of planning and control activities in a production system. A production system can be as small as a shop with only one machine or as big as a global operation including many manufacturing plants, distribution centers, and retail locations in multiple continents. The product of a production system can also vary in complexity based on the material used, technology employed, etc. Every product, whether a pencil or an airplane, is produced in a system which depends on good management to be successful. Production management has been at the center of industrial engineering and management science disciplines since the industrial revolution. The tools and techniques of production management have been so successful that they have been adopted to various service industries, as well. The book is intended to be a valuable resource to undergraduate and graduate students interested in the applications of production management under fuzziness. The chapters represent all areas of production management and are organized to reflect the natural order of production management tasks. In all chapters, special attention is given to applicability and wherever possible, numerical examples are presented. While the reader is expected to have a fairly good understanding of the fuzzy logic, the book provides the necessary notation and preliminary knowledge needed in each chapter.