Title: GA based static scheduling of multilevel assembly job shops

Authors: M. Omkumar, P. Shahabudeen, S. Gughan, A. Azad

Addresses: Department of Manufacturing Engineering, College of Engineering, Guindy, Chennai, Anna University, India. ' Department of Industrial Engineering, College of Engineering, Guindy, Chennai, Anna University, India. ' Cognizant Technology Solutions, Chennai, India. ' Department of Manufacturing Engineering, College of Engineering, Guindy, Chennai, Anna University, India

Abstract: This research focuses on scheduling operations of multi-level jobs, which undergo serial, parallel, and assembly operations in static assembly job shops with an objective of minimising makespan. A new optimisation heuristic based on Genetic Algorithm (GA) is proposed. Its performance is compared with some of the dispatch rules, which have best performances in scheduling multilevel jobs in dynamic assembly job shop. A simulation of assembly job shop is developed and integrated with a GA heuristic routine and analysed. It is found that the proposed algorithm performs well with respect to minimising the makespan compared to other dispatch rules.

Keywords: job shop scheduling; assembly job shops; GAs; genetic algorithms; dispatching rules; optimisation; multilevel jobs; simulation; makespan.

DOI: 10.1504/IJOR.2009.022600

International Journal of Operational Research, 2009 Vol.4 No.2, pp.197 - 213

Published online: 18 Jan 2009 *

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