O Ptimum D Esign of L Oop L Ayout in F Lexible M Anufacturing S Ystem – a N a Pproach of M Etaheuristics

FMS’s is indeed a very promising technology as they provide flexibility, which is essential for many manufacturing companies. FMS can yield a number of dissimilar jobs simultaneously. Each part requires different operations in a certain sequence and workstations can typically perform a variety of operations. A point to be noted here is each variety would be with low volume of production. This paper speaks about multiobjective optimization related to FMS scheduling which act as a constraint in configuring the loop layout in optimum manner by various Meta-heuristics like GA, SA etc. The first objective is concern with flexible batch scheduling problem (FBSP). The next objective is focus on design of loop layout from which optimum machine sequence with minimum total transportation cost is determined. In this paper the authors made an attempt to consider machine arrangements in an optimum sequence with flexible batch scheduling as constraints in an FMS. The various loop layout problems are tested for enactment of objective function with respect to computational time and number of iterations involved in GA and SA. The results of the different optimization algorithms are compared with existing results and conclusions are depicted.