GA BASED SCHEDULING OF AN FMS EQUIPPED WITH CENTRAL TOOL MAGAZINE

How to meet a variety of customized products and how to cope with the quick response for confirmed needs will gradually become the great challenge to the manager of present industry. Flexible Manufacturing System (FMS), with possession of medium-to-mass production and high flexibility, could be implemented in and regarded as strategic weapons for the operations management. For an FMS, the investment in versatile machines and the cutting tool cost are usually expensive. How efficiently utilizing the machines and allocating cutting tools are the big headache problems. Due to the applications of computerized automation, a machining part is almost without any part move during the manufacturing route because of versatile machines and adequate tool management. Consequently, a genetic algorithm(GA) based scheduling of FMS is developed in this paper. For given confirmed orders, a machine loading problem should be solved to achieve load balance and adequately allocating needed tools for a part with precedence route is discussed with the consideration of part scheduling, number of tools, and routing flexibility of a part. The objective is to minimize makespan and balance deviation. Finally, a numerical example is designed to demonstrate the proposed algorithm and we expect that the planned frame will affirmatively supply the useful solution methodology for the FMS scheduling problems