Scheduling in Cellular Manufacturing Systems
In cellular manufacturing systems machines are grouped into manufacturing cells. The aim is for each manufacturing cell to completely manufacture one or more groups of parts, so-called part families, with a view to significantly simplifying the material flows in the production system and minimizing setup costs. In terms of operations scheduling, an interesting problem hasto be solved, the so called "group scheduling problem": a processing sequence of part families as well as a sequence of parts within each family need to be determined considering sequence-dependent family setup times.
An additional challenge arises for operations scheduling when parts movements between manufacturing cells become necessary. This situation occurs quite often in actual production systems, as it is very rarely possible to create completely independent manufacturing cells. Powerful meta-heuristics such as simulated annealing or variable neighbourhood search, in particular, are being developed, tested and used to solve the problems.
Duration
Oktober 2010 - May 2016
