A heuristic procedure for production planning of modern manufacturing systems

The purpose of this paper is to present a new heuristic algorithm based on a feasible enumeration method, developed to solve the machine loading and product-mix decision problems for manufacturing systems based on group technology. It provides an efficient tool for machine load and product-mix analysis to optimally select parts to be manufactured in a limited amount of time available in a given production facility, by applying the group technology concept. A computational algorithm is developed, a sample numerical problem included, and computational results presented. It is shown that the algorithm herein proposed is very efficient from the computational view point. The heuristics imbedded in the feasible enumeration procedure is repreented by a priority rule which has been found to be independent of problem data and general for the class of problem analysed.