Study of Production Scheduling Problem for Reconfigurable Manufacturing System (RMS)

In the present competitive manufacturing environment, handling changes and uncertainties in the production scheduling is a major challenge Reconfigurable Manufacturing system (RMS) provides an effective and promising solution for this challenge. This paper provides a novel approach of production scheduling considering the reconfigurable machine tools. In Dedicated Manufacturing lines (DML) and flexible manufacturing systems (FMS) do not meet the challenges up to expected level because of short comings in their implementation procedurals like lack of support for product variation, scalable production capacity and high production cost, RMS provides the solution in designing a new manufacturing system with scalable flexibility and functionality which is needed in the manufacturing industry. This paper studies the problem of scheduling of different operations in for the selected product in reconfigurable manufacturing systems (RMS). The objective is to minimize the make span of the product by segregating and scheduling the similar operations of product. To solve the existing problem in the production scheduling different metaheuristic approaches are developed for simulation, models are evaluated for the performance. (C) 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.