Abstract
This paper presents a new two-phase (TP) approximate method for real-time scheduling in a flexible manufacturing system (FMS). This method combines a reduced enumeration schedule generation algorithm with a 0–1 optimization algorithm. In order to make the combined algorithm practicable, heuristic rules are introduced for the selection of jobs to be scheduled. The relative performance of the TP method vis-a-vis conventional heuristic dispatching rules such as SPT, LPT, FCFS, MWKR, and LWKR is investigated using combined process-interaction/discrete-event simulation models. An efficient experimental procedure is designed and implemented using these models, and the statistical analysis of the results is presented. For the particular case investigated, the conclusions are very encouraging. In terms of mean flow time, the TP method performs significantly better than any other tested heuristic dispatching rules. Also, the experimental results show that using global information significantly improves the FMS performance.
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Chang, Y.L., Sullivan, R.S., Bagchi, U. et al. Experimental investigation of real-time scheduling in flexible manufacturing systems. Ann Oper Res 3, 355–377 (1985). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02023749
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02023749