Scheduling flexible manufacturing cells using Tabu Search |
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| Authors: | RA Pitts Jr JA Ventura |
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| Affiliation: | 1. Department of Industrial, Manufacturing and Information Engineering , Morgan State University , Baltimore, MD, USA richard.pitts@morgan.edu;3. Department of Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering , The Pennsylvania State University , University Park, PA, USA |
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| Abstract: | Scheduling is an important aspect in the overall control of a flexible manufacturing system. The research presented focuses on production scheduling of jobs within a flexible manufacturing cell (FMC)–one type of flexible manufacturing system. Due to the complexity of the FMC scheduling problem, a 0–1 mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) model is formulated for M machines and N jobs with alternative routings. Although small instances of the problem can be solved optimally with MILP models, a two-stage Tabu Search (TS2 ) algorithm that minimises the manufacturing makespan (MS) is proposed to solve medium-to-large-scale problems more efficiently. During Stage I (construction phase), two heuristics are utilised to generate an initial feasible sequence and an initial MS solution. In Stage II (improvement phase), the acquired initial solutions from Stage I are combined with a Tabu Search meta-heuristic procedure that provides improved MS solutions. The TS2 algorithm provides tremendous savings in computational time for medium/large-sized multi-machine FMC problems. |
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| Keywords: | flexible manufacturing Tabu Search scheduling meta-heuristics mixed-integer linear programming |
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