Simulation of production scheduling in manufacturing systems

Research into production scheduling environments has been primarily concerned with developing local priority rules for selecting jobs from a queue to be processed on a set of individual machines. Most of the research deals with the scheduling problems in terms of the evaluation of priority rules with respect to given criteria. These criteria have a direct effect on the production cost, such as mean make-span, flow-time, job lateness, m-process inventory and machine idle time. The project under study consists of the following two phases. The first is to deal with the development of computer models for the flow-shop problem, which obtain the optimum make-span and near-optimum solutions for the well-used criteria in the production scheduling priority rules. The second is to develop experimental analysis using a simulation technique, for the two main manufacturing systems, 1. Job-shop 2. Flexible Manufacturing System The two manufacturing types were investigated under the following conditions i. Dynamic problem conditions ii. Different operation time distributions iii. Different shop loads iv. Seven replications per experiment with different streams of random number v. The approximately steady state point for each replication was obtained. In the FMS, the material handling system used was the automated guided Vehicles (AGVs), buffer station and load/ unload area were also used. The aim of these analyses is to deal with the effectiveness of the priority rules on the selected criteria performance. The SIMAN software simulation was used for these studies