Scheduling in cellular manufacturing systems: an heuristic approach

Adopting cellular manufacturing, which enables achieving the goals of just-in-time (JIT) philosophy, has benefited many world-class organizations. Many approaches have been developed for the design of cellular manufacturing systems (CMS). Scheduling of parts and part families in CMS is an important issue. In this study scheduling in flowline-based CMS is addressed by considering varying degrees of missing operations for parts in a cell. A simulated annealing (SA)-based algorithm has been developed for scheduling of parts within a cell for the objective of minimization of weighted sum of makespan, flowtime and idletime. The algorithm makes use of a pool of nine popularly used dispatching rules in scheduling literature. The performance of the proposed algorithm is evaluated using an alternative algorithm with three dispatching rules, and has been proposed and evaluated for minimization of weighted sum of makespan, flowtime and idletime. The proposed algorithm was also evaluated considering two benchmark algorithms, NEH heuristic for minimization of makespan and RC heuristic for minimization of flowtime. From the limited experimental results, it is found that the performance of the proposed algorithm with a larger pool of dispatching rules performs better than the three algorithms tested. Based on the results of the study, it is also found that the operational performance of CMS depends on the percentage of missing operations and scheduling approach (such as dispatching rules) used.