Improving a Flexible Manufacturing Scheduling using Genetic Algorithm

A Flexible Manufacturing System (FMS) is designed to produce a variety of products, utilizing a set of resources like work stations, robots etc., interlinked by certain means of transport. The prime characteristic of an FMS is that the overall system is under the computer control to realize these essential improvements in a firm; it imposes many challenging problems for planning, scheduling, monitoring and control of manufacturing system. These problems have a fundamental implication on the overall performance of a FMS, and influence the responsiveness of the system to satisfy the changing customer needs. In this study, dispatching rules are used to solve the scheduling problem. Further, the multiple dispatching rule based heuristic is proposed to search the optimal sequence of operations. Genetic Algorithm (GA) is used as a random search optimization technique in the proposed heuristic. Finally, the sequence determined with the proposed heuristic is utilized to develop based intelligent controller.