Planning in parallel machine shops and scheduling of flexible process plans in mould manufacturing shop

Abstract

In todaya??s competitive market, lead time of the product decides the survival of manufacturing industries. In this research, efforts are taken with an emphasis to improve the planning tasks in parallel machine shops. Sequencing and scheduling complexities prevalent in parallel machine shops are usually solved using heuristic and Meta heuristic algorithms. Two heuristic algorithms are proposed to solve the computational time complexities of parallel machine shops. One of the developed heuristic algorithms provides the polynomial time solution for this case. Studies are also conducted with four Meta heuristic algorithms namely genetic algorithm, simulated annealing algorithm, tabu search and memetic algorithm to improve the planning problems in parallel machine shops. A new approach which can combine the sequencing and scheduling tasks of parallel machine shops are developed and evaluated. This research also deals with the scheduling of flexible process plans in mould manufacturing shops.