Integrated process planning and scheduling for large-scale flexible job shops using metaheuristics

In this paper, we discuss an integrated process planning and scheduling problem in large-scale flexible job shops (FJSs). We assume that products can be manufactured in different ways, i.e. using different bills of materials (BOM) and routes for the same product. The total weighted tardiness is the performance measure of interest. A Mixed Integer Programming formulation is provided for the researched problem. Because of the NP-hardness of the investigated problem, an iterative scheme is designed that is based on variable neighbourhood search (VNS) on the process planning level. Appropriate neighbourhood structures for VNS are proposed. Because the evaluation of each move within VNS requires the solution of a large-scale FJS scheduling problem instance, efficient heuristics based on local search from previous research are considered on the scheduling level. Extensive computational experiments based on new randomly generated problem instances are conducted. In addition, a parallel version of the VNS is investigated within the computational experiments. The proposed iterative scheme is benchmarked against a genetic algorithm (GA) from the literature that simultaneously considers process planning and scheduling for the special case where a single BOM is available for each product. It turns out that the new iterative scheme outperforms the GA and a memetic algorithm based on the GA. It is able to solve even large-size problem instances in reasonable amount of time.