Machine Loading in Flexible Manufacturing System: A Swarm Optimization Approach

Loading is one of the vital issues in flexible manufacturing system (FMS) production planning which deals with assignment of the necessary operations and tools among various machines in an optimal manner. Such a problem is combinatorial in nature and found to be NP-complete. In this paper, an attempt has been made to address such problems using mutation in particle swarm optimization (PSO) to avoid premature convergence with the objective of minimization of system unbalance. Promising results have been obtained when the solution is compared with existing techniques for ten standard problems available in literature representing three different FMS scenarios.