A Genetic Algorithm for Scheduling Flexible Manufacturing Cells

In this study, scheduling of Flexible Manufacturing Cells (FMC) is taken into consideration. This type of production system combines the merit of job shop and flow shop production systems. FMS Scheduling belongs to the class of problems that are known as NP-hard. This study presents a genetic algorithm-based technique to schedule machines and Automated Guided Vehicle (AGV), simultaneously. To generate schedules from a given chromosome, four Priority Dispatching Rules (PDR) are considered. Maximum completion time or makespan is defined as the objective function. The algorithm was coded and many randomly generated problems were solved. The obtained results were compared with optimum values obtained from the most comprehensive mathematical formulation in the literature. The experimental results show that the proposed method performs well in terms of efficiency and quality of solutions. For further study, the researchers will consider this problem in multi-objective environment.