Title: Evaluation of meta-heuristic approaches for scheduling optimisation of flexible manufacturing systems

Authors: M. Saravanan; A. Noorul Haq

Addresses: VPV College of Engineering, Dindigul Periyakulam National Highway, D.Vadipatty, Devadanapatty-Post, Periyakulam-TK, Theni-District 625 602, Tamil Nadu, India. ' Department of Production Engineering, National Institute of Technology, Tiruchirappalli, Tamil Nadu 620015, India

Abstract: Nowadays, in modern manufacturing, the trend is the development of Computer Integrated Manufacturing (CIM). The productivity of CIM is highly depending on the scheduling of Flexible Manufacturing System (FMS). Shortening the makespan leads to decreasing machines idle time, which results in improvement in CIM productivity. This paper proposes a meta-heuristic approach called Ant Colony Optimisation (ACO) method for scheduling optimisation of FMSs by considering multiple objectives, i.e., minimising the idle time of the machine and minimising the total penalty cost for not meeting the due date concurrently. The results available for the various existing meta-heuristic methods (Jerald et al., 2005) are compared with results obtained by ACO method.

Keywords: FMS scheduling; flexible manufacturing systems; metaheuristics; scatter search; ant colony system; ACO; optimisation; machine idle times; due dates.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCAT.2011.045403

International Journal of Computer Applications in Technology, 2011 Vol.42 No.2/3, pp.150 - 158

Published online: 11 Feb 2012 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article