Title: Some metaheuristic approaches for optimising tardiness of job and tool in a flexible manufacturing system

Authors: P. Udhayakumar; S. Kumanan

Addresses: Department of Production Engineering, National Institute of Technology, Tiruchirappalli – 620 015, Tamilnadu, India. ' Department of Production Engineering, National Institute of Technology, Tiruchirappalli – 620 015, Tamilnadu, India

Abstract: Job and tool flows are the two key factors in the operation of FMS. The work centre of FMS can process a group of jobs. The usage of common tool magazine is in practice for FMS facilities in order to reduce tool inventory. The objective of this paper is to generate an active schedules and optimal sequence of job and tool that can meet minimum tardiness for the FMS. In this paper, non-traditional optimisation algorithms such as genetic algorithm, SA algorithm, ACO algorithm and PSO algorithm are proposed to derive near optimal solutions which adopt the extended Giffler and Thompson algorithm for active schedule generation. Twenty problems have been randomly generated for the performance analysis of the proposed methodologies. The performances of the proposed algorithms are compared with tardiness and computational time. The analysis reveals that PSO algorithm provides better solution with reasonable computational time.

Keywords: FMS scheduling; flexible manufacturing system; genetic algorithms; GAs; simulated annealing; ant colony optimisation; ACO; particle swarm optimisation; PSO; metaheuristics; minimum tardiness; job flows; tool flows.

DOI: 10.1504/IJAOM.2012.047683

International Journal of Advanced Operations Management, 2012 Vol.4 No.3, pp.219 - 252

Published online: 11 Aug 2014 *

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