Evaluation of process variants during the proposal preparation

Abstract There are many important factors for small and medium sized enterprises (SME), especially individual customer demands, price pressure and the probability to deliver at the required date. Companies which want to be supplier for larger companies have to look carefully about these factors already during the proposal preparation. They are often in the branch of single-part or small-series production. One possibility to increase known factors is to consider different variants of manufacturing a product and the premature investigation of resources and there capacities. Therefore, this paper is introducing a conceptional framework for the evaluation of different process variants to manufacture a product. We want to optimise and evaluate process variants including the necessary resources and their capacitive use in an evaluated period. For this evaluation we use a genetic algorithm. Within this paper we define and classify a scheduling problem to map our requirements. Afterwards we explain the necessary information about a genetic algorithm that suites us for the solution of our problem.