Manufacturing cell scheduling using genetic algorithms

Abstract: This paper presents a new approach to the scheduling of manufacturing cells which have flow-shop configuration. The approach is based on the genetic algorithm, which is a meta-heuristic for solving combinatorial optimization problems. The performance measure demonstrated in this paper is the optimization of the mean flow time. The procedure developed automatically computes the make-span. A flexible manufacturing cell schedule is used as a case study. The genetic algorithm procedure was used to solve a published data set for simple scheduling problems. The genetic algorithm procedure was further used to solve large flow-shop scheduling problems having machine sizes of up to 30 and job sizes of up to 100 in very reasonable computation time. The results show that the genetic-algorithm-based heuristic is promising for scheduling manufacturing cells