Progressive Modeling and the Reconfiguration and Operations Planning Problem

In this paper, the progressive modeling approach and the Reconfiguration and Operation Planning (ROP) problem are introduced. Progressive Modeling (PM) is a forward-looking multi-disciplinary modeling approach that has been developed to modernize the modeling process of today’s complex industrial problems and create pragmatic solutions for many of them. Many principles and foundations of progressive modeling will be presented while utilizing the reconfiguration and operation planning problem (ROP) as a demonstrating application. The ROP problem describes a new approach of reconfiguration and operations planning in a reconfigurable manufacturing environment. PM is about to spark a new paradigm of solving large-scale system problems in many engineering and business domains in a highly pragmatic way without losing the scientific rigor.