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.