A Study of Scheduling in a Mold Manufacturing Cell

As modern manufacturing plants tend to group their machinery in manufacturing cells for greater efficiency, a good scheduling technique within each cell is very critical in ensuring the smooth operation of the entire plant. With this in mind, this study is focused on scheduling jobs in a mold manufacturing cell. The present method involves many problems of coordination between departments and schedules used do not consider the optimality of the manufacturing cell. With the help of proper scheduling management, it is hoped that these problems will be eliminated and more efficient schedules are obtained. The goal of scheduling is often makespan or flow-time. However, in the manufacturing cell industries, priority weighted earliness with tardiness penalty might be more suitable in generating usable solutions. The branch and bound technique is used because of its enumerative and flexible nature. The algorithm was tested on real industrial manufacturing cell data and very promising schedules have been obtained.